Page 18 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS339 Takashi IOKA

Quality assurance framework of the Japanese
business register
Takashi IOKA
1
Statistics Bureau of Japan, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications

Abstract
In this paper, two kinds of new frameworks which will start from 2019 to ensure
the quality of the Statistical Business Register (BR) in the Statistics Bureau of
Japan (SBJ) will be introduced. The first framework is the Economic Census
2019 which will be conducted from June 2019. In Japan, the Economic Census
has been conducted almost twice every five years (2009, 2012, 2014 and 2016).
The results of the Economic Census have been recorded in the BR as its basic
data source. In the results of the last Economic Census conducted in 2016, all
the enterprises located in Japan have been recorded in the BR with basic
information such as their name, address, number of employees, industrial
classification, turnover, and so on. In the Economic Census 2019, a new
administrative data called Corporate Number will be used for the purpose of
ensuring the quality of the BR frame. The National Tax Agency assigns a
Corporate Number (13-digit) to each enterprise, and publishes the number
with the name and address of the company’s head office to improve the
efficiency of management of information on enterprises, reduce the cost
associated with reference and exchange of enterprise information, etc. By
using this new data for the Economic Census 2019, it is expected that the
frame of the BR will be updated in an even more efficient and precise manner.
The second one is the profiling which will also start from 2019. The latest basic
information of large enterprises will be regularly grasped by the profiling team
in the National Statistics Center through an interactive profiling system. The
profiling team and the large enterprises can communicate with each other by
accessing the system. The information gathered by the profilers will be
promptly recorded in the BR. The role of the profilers is not only gathering
information from large enterprises, but also reducing their response burden
by helping and supporting large enterprises to respond to the surveys
conducted by the Japanese government. In this effort, it is expected that the
accuracy of the data about large enterprises in the BR will improve more than
ever. In this paper, details of those two frameworks will be described.

Keywords
Economic Census; Corporate Number; Profiling

1 The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
policies of the Statistics Bureau of Japan.

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