BACK TO SCHEDULE REGULAR

Session 22

European Statistical System Peer Review Recommendations

4 June 2026
14:15 – 15:45
ŠIBENIK III

Presentation title
Enhancing the Legal Framework for Statistical Independence: Lessons from Liechtenstein
The most recent peer review of Liechtenstein, conducted in the summer of 2023, resulted in 17 recommendations for the Office for Statistics, one of which directly addresses compliance.

Read more Read less

This recommendation advocates adapting the legal framework to further safeguard the independence of official statistics, thereby reinforcing public trust in statistical outputs. In the context of a small country, such legal amendments appear feasible, and the government has expressed its support for these initiatives.

This paper presents our experience with the rare opportunity to revise the legal foundation of our professional activities, the Statistics Act. The legislative process, encompassing legal reviews, governmental approval, and parliamentary deliberation, is inherently protracted. We commenced this process shortly after defining an improvement action plan. A dedicated team responsible for the amendment met biweekly to ensure continuity and progress.

The initial phase involved a comprehensive analysis of the existing Statistics Act and the identification of provisions that could compromise the independence of the statistical office. During an intensive three-day external workshop, we employed quality management tools, including a fishbone diagram, to structure influencing factors and articulate the target state. Furthermore, a 1-5-10 diagram facilitated the evaluation of potential positive and negative impacts of achieving the stated objective across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons. Subsequently, we initiated an iterative drafting process, revising and formulating new articles individually. Legal expertise proved indispensable during this stage, both for addressing specific questions and for ensuring conceptual coherence in the proposed amendments.

Stakeholder engagement constituted a critical component of the process. Continuous communication with the Statistics Commission, the competent ministry, and the government was maintained to secure and sustain support. This was achieved through regular meetings, workshops, detailed project descriptions, and presentations of conceptual frameworks and comprehensive proposals. Such measures also served as a safeguard, providing robust arguments should the project face scrutiny or opposition.

Although the legislative amendment process remains ongoing, several preliminary insights have emerged. First, a continuous and iterative approach has been instrumental in maintaining focus and advancing toward the desired outcome. The application of quality management tools has facilitated structured argumentation and decision-making. Second, sustained legal support throughout the process has proven essential for both technical precision and strategic guidance. Third, persistent efforts to reaffirm stakeholder commitment are indispensable. Nonetheless, challenges and resistance have arisen, underscoring the complexity of implementing structural reforms to enhance the quality of official statistics.

Main author / Presenter
Priska Heinzle
National Statistical Institute

Read more Read less

Priska Heinzle ist is repsonsible for the quality management of the Liechtenstein national statistical office since November 2023. In this funktion she serves as a peer review coordinator and particpates at the Eurostat Quality Working Group. She has degrees in psychology and business administration and several years experience in quality management.

Presentation title
Monitoring and follow-up of peer review improvement actions in the ESS
The finalisation of the third round of the ESS peer reviews was officially marked on 23 May 2024, when a closing event took place in Luxembourg, focusing on areas where the most recommendations for improvements had been made.

Read more Read less

During the event, discussions were organised covering aspects on coordination, cooperation, user engagement and communication of European statistics. Following that, ESSC endorsed ideas for ensuing actions at ESS level. In addition, all 31 ESS countries developed national action plans to address the recommendations from the peer reviews.

The implementation of the ESS national improvement action plans has been systematically monitored by Eurostat. More than half of the improvement actions are expected to be completed by the time of the second monitoring cycle, the outcomes of which are to be presented to the ESSC in May 2026. Therefore, this interim point is an appropriate moment to take stock and analyse the impact of the ESS peer reviews and their corresponding recommendations on the overall capacity of the system to assure the quality of European statistics.

Main author / Presenter
Ilcho Bechev
Eurostat

Read more Read less

With more than 15 years in official statistics, Ilcho Bechev is currently the Team Leader of Quality Management at Eurostat. Previously, he was working in the statistical domains of balance of payments and R&D statistics at Eurostat. In addition, he has professional experience in the private sector in banking, telecoms and credit rating.

Presentation title
Alignment of the Irish Statistical System Code of Practice (ISSCoP) to the European Statistical Code of Practice (ES CoP).
In 2022 the peer review recommended that the Central Statistics Office (CSO) align the Irish Statistical System Code of Practice (ISSCoP) benchmark with the European Statistical Code of Practice (ES CoP).

Read more Read less

The recommendation aimed to enhance the credibility, coherence and international comparability of official statistics while respecting Ireland’s national context, available resources, institutional capacity and ongoing momentum.

ISSCoP established by the CSO as part of the Irish National Data Infrastructure, articulates five core principles - professional independence, accessibility and clarity, punctuality and timeliness, commitment to quality and statistical confidentiality – to guide the production and dissemination of Official Statistics within Ireland. ES CoP sets out sixteen principles with a comprehensive set of indicators of good practice which underpin each principle

This paper will outline the journey to date in embedding ISSCoP within the structure of ES CoP. It will document how the NSS can systematically address both national policy needs and evolving data user expectations while taking account of the strategic effort to ensure that official statistics produced at the national level meet evolving quality expectations within the European Statistical System (ESS). The alignment supports evidence-based decision-making and will strengthen the statistical system’s responsiveness to innovations in data sources, methodologies and user requirements.

Aligning ISSCoP with ES CoP will bring clear benefits (trust, transparency, credibility) but also creates several practical and institutional challenges:

 Institutional Capacity

 Resource and Cost constraints

 Proportionality & Flexibility

 Cultural and Organisational Capacity

 Coordination across the system

 Quality Assurance & Documentation

The paper will highlight the progress made to date where that has been an increased number of applications and re-applications for ISSCoP certification from the NSS and will discuss the core challenge is balancing this increased momentum while transitioning to the high level European code designed for NSI’s in a practical, proportionate and practical way.

Main author / Presenter
Maria Looney
Central Statistics Office (CSO)

Read more Read less

Maria has worked in the Central Statistics Office (CSO) for nearly twenty years. Maria's role is the ISSCoP Certification Coordinator for the National Statistical System (NSS) which involves coordination, engagement and collaboration with a range of Public Sector Bodies with a view to achieving the Irish Statistical System Code of Practice (ISSCoP) award. Before this role, Maria worked for a number of years with the Learning & Development Team in the CSO.

Presentation title
Dealing with quality at the NSI level: an ongoing task through peer reviews
The second round of peer reviews urges Insee to « further develop its vision, and related integrated and systematic implementation strategy and framework, [to integrate] quality management throughout the national statistical system ».

Read more Read less

As a result, a few years ago, Insee defined a process map for the whole institute. Based on the international standards (GAMSO, GSBPM), this comprehensive map is nowadays the backbone of our quality management.

Considering the 100+ processes to be managed, a fully supervised system can only be reached in the long term but this goal requires to monitor progress and to motivate the staff on pursuing their efforts regarding quality. In this article, we will be examining two aspects of quality measurement: first, internal documentation and then external evaluation of the process.

Documenting is a considerable task: it has to meet its audience, to be in line with effective tasks, to be delivered in a timely manner. An additional difficulty is that those who work hard for it will never use it nor benefit from it... Following the 2021 peer review, a workgroup has recently defined what could be a typical documentation for a process, first dividing it in two sets, the how-to procedures and the general setting of the process. Various aspects have to be taken into account to produce a relevant documentation: the materials, the tools, the needed skills to produce it and also to use it.

Evaluating and benchmarking processes share a different point of view : people outside the everyday work look into the process, seeking ways to improve it. After several years of practice, Insee’s quality unit has defined a methodology for the reviews led by its quality experts. This is used to examine the « essential » processes, a selection of Insee’s major activities defined after the 2021 peer review. To say it in a nutshell, despite having been reluctant at first, process managers are, in the end, grateful for the help. Furthermore, it is part of a series of audits, which allow the analysis of quality at different levels (e.g. internal audit, peer review).

Following again the peers’ recommendations, we will be concluding on the necessary condition of user-oriented communication about the results of all these works, as a just reward for the energy spent but also to foster a quality culture through the national statistical system. And spoiler alert, there’s still room for improvement !

Main author / Presenter
Frédéric Minodier
INSEE

Read more Read less

Frédéric Minodier is head of the Quality Unit at INSEE, the French statistical institute. He has a wide range of experience in the fields of production, dissemination and methodology.

Presentation title
DOCUMENTATION OF STATISTICAL METHODS AS A PILLAR OF QUALITY, TRUST, AND THE FUTURE!
During the latest peer review of the European statistical system, the report written by experts and published in early 2024 on the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) concluded that the code of practice is well implemented and that the Swiss statistical system generally achieves a high level of quality.

Read more Read less

In parallel, an improvement action plan has been proposed to respond to the recommendations of the experts mandated by Eurostat. We will focus here on the first of these, which specifies that the OFS should strengthen its documentation on methodology and quality to cover more statistical areas.

To address this, the FSO has mandated the unit responsible for quality and processes to conduct an internal quality review, the results of which should enable to achieve these objectives progressively from 2025 onwards. This quality review has notably enabled the development of a conceptual framework that specifies how to broaden the spectrum of publications through criteria for determining the type of document. These criteria will be presented in detail along with the corresponding classification. This new approach to documentation should therefore allow for a better coverage of more statistical areas and reduce the time it takes to publish methodological documentation.

It is important to emphasize here that this gain in efficiency does not come at the expense of quality. Indeed, a rigorous process with precise rules for proofreading has been developed with the aim of guaranteeing the quality of the publications.

Finally, several implementation examples will be presented with documented statistical methods in both conventional statistical production and in the field of innovation, using flash estimates for example.

Main author / Presenter
Jean-Pierre Renfer
Federal Statistical Office

Read more Read less

Dr. Jean-Pierre Renfer holds a Phd Degree (1997) and a Master Degree (1990) in Statistics as well as a Diploma in Mathematics (1989). Since 1997 he works at the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. In 2000 he became Methodologist and successively Senior methodologist (2002), Head of a group of consulants (2007), Deputy Head of the statistical methods unit METH (2012) and Head of METH (2015). Since 2020 he is also Deputy Head of the Division Data science, artificial intelligence and statistical methods. From 2014 to 2025 he served as a member of the Swiss Ethics Council for Official Statistics, being its Vice-President since 2020. He teaches since 2018 as “Academic Fellow of the University of Geneva” different courses in survey sampling. He also served as course leader for “Advanced Methods for Survey Sampling” in the training program in Statistics from Eurostat.

CO-AUTHOR: