The unified enterprise survey - its approach to quality - ARCHIVED

This paper discusses the approach that Statistics Canada has taken to improve the quality of annual business surveys through their integration in the Unified Enterprise Survey (UES). The primary objective of the UES is to measure the final annual sales of goods and services accurately by province, in sufficient detail and in a timely manner.

This paper describes the methodological approaches that the UES has used to improve financial and commodity data quality in four broad areas. These include improved coherence of the data collected from different levels of the enterprise, better coverage of industries, better depth of information (in the sense of more content detail and estimates for more detailed domains) and better consistency of the concepts and methods across industries.

The approach, in achieving quality, has been to (a) establish a base measure of the quality of the business survey program prior to the UES, (b) measure the annual data quality of the UES, and (c) carry out specific studies to better understand the quality of UES data and methods.