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Response Burden Reduction More Noticeable for Businesses in the Netherlands (307999)

Keywords: business surveys, official statistics,

For the last 25 years Statistics Netherlands has actively worked on managing response burden in business surveys, resulting in a large decrease of the total response burden to an almost minimum level. Statistics Netherlands keeps working on new approaches to further reduce burden, for example by using techniques like webscraping. Next to this, we are now also explicitly focusing on making response burden reductions more noticeable. This new focus is based on the insight that overall burden reductions are only meaningful for respondents if they notice this in the burden of their individual business. As a part of this new focus ‘hotspots’ are defined, being businesses whose total survey load is relatively high. The new focus on making response burden reductions more noticeable for businesses is elaborated in four themes: 1) Targeted improvements for ‘hotspots’; 2) Further improvements in targeted communication with the businesses including dialogues with relevant statistical data; 3) Implementation of a new enforcement policy that on the one hand builds on enabling and stimulating compliance, and on the other hand is more strict and fair; 4) Attention for opportunities for inter-governmental cooperation to reduce overall government response burden.