Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency (1992) / Chapter Skim
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COMMENTARY
COMMENTARY
Pages 9-24
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From page 9... ...
. Once established, many statistical agencies engage in all these functions to varying degrees.
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Statistical agencies disseminate data for statistical purposes, not for administrative, regulatory or enforcement uses. This definition of a federal statistical agency does not include many statistical activities of the federal government because they are not performed by distinct units or because they do not result in the dissemination of statistics to others for example, statistics compiled by the Postal Service to set rates or by the Department of Defense to test weapons.
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PRINCIPLES FOR A FEDERAL STATISTICAL AGENCY A federal statistical agency must be in a position to provide information relevant to issues of public policy. An agency not only supplies information for the use of immediate managers and policy makers in the executive branch and for legislative designers and overseers in Congress, but to all those who require statistical information on public issues, whether the information is needed for purposes of production, trade, consumption, or participation in civic affairs.
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Federal statistical agencies should strive to meet the heavy responsibility for impartiality and objectivity that this role places on them. Federal statistical agencies usually are in touch with the primary users in their own departments.
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A Strong Measure of Independence Statistical agencies produce the information by which present conditions are analyzed, comparisons with the past are made, and plans for the
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Most statistical agencies have broad authority, but it is limited by budgetary constraints, departmental interests, OMB review, and congressional mandates. The courts sometimes become involved in interpreting laws and regulations that affect statistical agencies, as in a number of confidentiality and freedom of information issues, and in the issue of adjusting the census.
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From page 15... ...
The heads of statistical agencies must be prepared to deal with requests from other programs in their own department or agency, from other agencies and organizations, or from the courts wanting to use individually identifiable data for nonstatistical purposes. When such uses would be contrary to confidentiality pledges to data providers, agency heads should do everything in their power to deny access to the data.
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Because of the disclosure risks associated with detailed tabulations and publicuse microdata files, there is always a tension between the desire to safeguard confidentiality and the desire to provide broader public access to data. This dilemma is an important one to federal statistical agencies, and it has stimulated ongoing efforts to develop new statistical and administrative procedures to safeguard confidentiality while permitting more extensive access.
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Some statistical agencies have developed "quality profiles" for some of their major series. These have proved helpful to experienced users.
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Commitment to Quality and Professional Standards The best guarantee of high-quality results is a strong professional staff that combines experts in the subject-matter fields covered by the agency's program and experts in statistical methods and techniques. A major function of an agency's managers is to strike a balance among those two groups and promote working relationships that make the agency's program as productive as possible, with each group of experts contributing to the work of the other.
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From page 19... ...
contributions to the theory of area sampling and the application of the theory in the first continuous probability sample of households. Federal statistical agencies, frequently in partnership with academic researchers, have also pioneered the national economic accounts, input-output models, microsimulation techniques, and similar analytic methods.
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Professional Advancement of Staff An effective federal statistical agency requires a strong professional staff, experts in the subject matter as well as statisticians. An agency should encourage high performance by adopting personnel policies designed for recruiting, developing, and retaining such a staff.
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Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, OIRA desk officers review proposed data collection instruments. The Statistical Policy Office, generally working with the assistance of interagency committees, issues statistical standards; reviews concepts of interest to more than one agency; publishes classification systems for general use (of industries, occupations, standard metropolitan areas, etc.~; consults with other parts of OMB on statistical budgets; and, by reviewing the statistical program of the government as a whole, identifies gaps in statistical data.
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From page 22... ...
In other cases, federal statistical agencies engage in cooperative data collection with state counterparts to let one collection system satisfy the needs of both. A number of such joint systems have been developed, notably by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the National Center for Health Statistics.
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From page 23... ...
Sometimes federal statistical agencies play a third role, that of monitor and consultant on statistical matters to other units within the same department (see e.g., Levine et al., 1985.) There is no set rule or guideline for the establishment of a separate federal statistical agency in contrast to carrying on statistical activities within
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From page 24... ...
The functional separation of statistical data, recommended by the Privacy Protection Study Commission (1977) , is easier to maintain when the collection and compilation are conducted in a unit separate from operating units.
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