The challenges of the use of administrative data in the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours

The Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH) is a monthly survey using two sources of data: a census of payroll deduction (PD7) forms (administrative data) and a survey of business establishments. This paper focuses on the processing of the administrative data, from the weekly receipt of data from the Canada Revenue Agency to the production of monthly estimates produced by SEPH.

The edit and imputation methods used to process the administrative data have been revised in the last several years. The goals of this redesign were primarily to improve the data quality and to increase the consistency with another administrative data source (T4) which is a benchmark measure for Statistics Canada's System of National Accounts people. An additional goal was to ensure that the new process would be easier to understand and to modify, if needed. As a result, a new processing module was developed to edit and impute PD7 forms before their data is aggregated to the monthly level.

This paper presents an overview of both the current and new processes, including a description of challenges that we faced during development. Improved quality is demonstrated both conceptually (by presenting examples of PD7 forms and their treatment under the old and new systems) and quantitatively (by comparison to T4 data).