Brussels, 08/02/2008 (Agence Europe) - As part of its commitment to cut red tape and remove excessive regulation, on Thursday 7 February, the Commission submitted to the European Parliament and Council a proposal for a regulation amending the current Community arrangements on statistics of trade between member states (regulation [EC] n°638/2004). The proposal provides the legal framework for exempting more companies from providing Intrastat information, while, at the same time, preserving the accuracy of data and satisfying user requirements for statistics on trade by business characteristics.
The proposal has four objectives: - to reduce the number of enterprises obliged by Community legislation to report to the system of intra-Community trade statistics (Intrastat), thus reducing the statistical reporting burden; - to tighten the quality requirements for the compilation of intra-Community trade statistics in order to compensate for the loss in data accuracy for trade that is not declared by enterprises but estimated by national authorities; - to respond to user needs by compiling intra-Community trade statistics broken down by business characteristics; - in line with the regulatory procedure with scrutiny (comitology), to confer on the Commission power to define the conditions under which it may adopt different or specific rules applying to specific goods or movements, adapt the reference period to take into account the linkage with value added tax and customs obligations, determine the arrangements for the collection of this information, particularly the codes to be employed, define the minimum Intrastat coverage, define the conditions and quality requirements under which member states may simplify the information to be provided for small individual transactions, define the aggregated data to be transmitted and the criteria the estimates are to comply with, adopt implementing provisions for compiling the statistics by linking data on business characteristics under regulation (EEC) n° 2186/93 with statistics on dispatches and arrivals of goods, determine the indicators and standards enabling the quality of the data to be assessed, determine the structure of the quality reports to be presented by member states, and take any other steps necessary for assessing or improving the quality of the data. (O.L.)