New regulation on statistics to enhance collaboration among state agencies

An amended statistics law which is scheduled to be passed in the National Assembly this plenary session has a new regulation on extracting data from administrative records. This will be an effective solution to simplify data collection by enhancing collaboration among state agencies.

Vietnamese enterprises must report significant numbers, such as changes in human resources or changes in products, to many different state departments, including the tax department and the statistics department. Though it is the same information, companies must provide data in different formats to several agencies. This not only requires time and resources from the enterprise, but also from the government branches, to collect and archive the data.

The tax department has its own tax record system, while other agencies, such as the Customs Department or the Investment Department, also have their own system. Data are archived by the different groups separately. In fact, the Department of Statistics and the Department of Tax have collaborated and shared data for 5 years, but only by agreement, not by law.

As extracting data for statistics from relevant agencies is not stated in law, it is not active and requires a lot of time. The statistics department and relevant agencies have to sit down together and spend up to a month to come up with a plan as well as allocate human resources for collaboration.

To overcome this issue, the National Assembly is amending the current Law on Statistics by adding a new regulation for extracting secondary information from administrative records. Primary information is collected via investigation by statistics agencies. According to the General Department of Statistics, gathering secondary information in this way will simplify the data extraction process, making it faster and more accurate.

Administrative records are considered a valuable information resource. The amended statistics law is expected to simplify the process of gathering statistics for both data collectors and providers.