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Collecting Earnings Statistics using Payroll Software - Lessons from Ireland

Keywords: Earnings Statistics, XML, response burden

In 2008 the Central Statistics Office in Ireland introduced, with the cooperation of all the major payroll (software) systems providers, a facility whereby statistical returns for the Earnings, Hours and Employment Costs Survey (EHECS) could be returned automatically via XML. In 2010 the ambitions and design of this survey were reassessed following a review to understand why the original objectives were not being achieved. From this review a number of important lessons were learned and changes made to salvage the project. This paper presents a frank summary of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to data collection.