European Union: validation of data
19.58. Validation of data is performed by the national data providers as well as by Eurostat. Through that process, the plausibility of the data (e.g., the development of time series and possible outliers) and their internal consistency (aggregates should match the sum of the sub-items) is verified. The strong link between structural business statistics (SBS) and inward FATS also exists when validating the data.
19.59. In European Union countries, inward FATS data are usually extracted from the data sources used for SBS, and the results for both domains should be consistent. Some member states have registers of enterprise groups or foreign-owned enterprises that can be used as a basis for identification of the population of foreign-controlled domestic enterprises and such registers are treated as the main source of information for identifying the target populations. However, in practice, such consistency is not always assured. A principal cause of inconsistency is the sometimes considerable difference between the frame populations used for the inward FATS data collection and the foreign-controlled subset of the SBS population. That should not be a problem if correct grossing-up methods are used. In that case, the total number of all enterprises, including domestic-controlled ones, should be equal in both SBS and inward FATS.