The government is discussing the modernization of data collection and processing by Rosstat

The government is discussing further modernization of Rosstat’s data collection and processing system. Official statistics are planned to be accelerated through interdepartmental data exchange and expanding the range of information used, including big data, and the latter, in turn, is expected to lead to quality and detail suitable for statistics. Approaches to this are already being tested in practice, but the difficulties of their implementation are associated with the lack of uniformity of information, which, in particular, is planned to be solved by standardizing the quality of data for government agencies and modernizing the work of Rosstat.

The government devoted yesterday’s strategic session to the development of statistics. According to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, based on data, as a “key resource,” government agencies make decisions and make forecasts, and enterprises draw up business strategies and investment programs. Official statistics are based on international methods, which “do not always reflect the opportunities that digital transformation and technological progress have brought,” the prime minister complained.

Without international methodology, Russian statistics will lose comparability with data from other countries. De facto, Rosstat finds itself in a position where it acts as both a supplier of “official” data for government administration (budget planning, industrial and social policy, economic forecasting, etc.) and a consumer of departmental and commercial information administered by government agencies. At the same time, according to Mikhail Mishustin, although the service supplies the government with more than half of the data, the information systems of 63 government agencies, the statistical work of which he coordinates and on which he relies, as a rule, are built “according to their own methodology and on their own technological and organizational solutions.” The situation is also complicated by the fact that some of the data is collected by Rosstat manually (for example, on prices and the census), on paper (for example, on migration), and from the existing sources of departmental data, only part of it ends up in statistical processing.

The importance and complexity of the task of developing statistical accounting is increased by the constant expansion of the use of data in government administration – for this, the White House is actively developing the GAS “Management” (see “Kommersant” on January 9), which is the central link in the interaction of government agencies when using departmental GIS and databases. To improve the quality, comparability and “speed of production” of statistical data, the government considers it necessary to establish interdepartmental exchange, as well as the use of “all available sources.” However, the question of who should adapt to the situation of excess data – Rosstat, bound by the methodology, or information providers – so far, according to Kommersant, does not have a single answer in the White House, although it seems impossible to solve it within the framework of one statistical service or without its participation obvious.

According to a federal official who participated in the strategic session, fine-tuning the work of Rosstat is important – in particular, the service can modernize its systems to make maximum use of administrative data, as well as expand its capabilities as a state “data scientist.” This should also reduce the reporting burden on businesses – Rosstat receives information from more than 7 million business entities using hundreds of forms at the federal level alone. According to White House estimates, approximately a fifth of them are repeatedly sent to different departments – in connection with this, a bill has been developed to reduce statistical reporting of business (see Kommersant of February 15).

However, pilot projects to include the state statistics service in the work of a single cloud platform and provide it with operational information available to the Federal Tax Service and the Pension Fund (see “Kommersant” dated March 24, 2020) revealed the same problems that the Federal Tax Service previously encountered (when creating a single population register) and the Ministry of Finance (when trying to catalog everything that the state buys in public procurement), including the lack of a unified nomenclature of goods and services for the economy and discrepancies in data sets, forcing the search for additional sources. For example, when assessing the potential of using data from cash register equipment to calculate inflation, the bottleneck turned out to be the lack of unified directories of goods and services and the absence of a point of sale address in the cash register data. The idea of ​​introducing into a number of existing GIS all the fields required for statistical needs has made it possible to create a set of indicators that can be calculated in this way, but the task rests on the dissemination of a data quality standard that will suit both statisticians and officials.

Evgenia Kryuchkova, Oleg Sapozhkov