Quality assessment
Article 8
1. For the purpose of this Regulation, the following quality assessment dimensions shall apply to the data to be transmitted: (a) ‘relevance’ shall refer to the degree to which statistics meet the current and potential needs of users; (b) ‘accuracy’ shall refer to the closeness of estimates to the unknown true values; (c) ‘timeliness’ shall refer to the time lag between the availability of the information and the event or phenomenon it describes; (d) ‘punctuality’ shall refer to the time lag between the date of the release of the data and the target date when it should have been delivered; (e) ‘accessibility’ and ‘clarity’ shall refer to the conditions and modalities by which users can obtain, use and interpret data; (f) ‘comparability’ shall refer to the measurement of the impact of differences in applied statistical concepts and measurement tools and procedures when statistics are compared between geographical areas, sectoral domains or over time; (g) ‘coherence’ shall refer to the adequacy of the data to be reliably combined in different ways and for various uses. 2. Every five years each Member State shall provide the Commission (Eurostat) with a report on the quality of the data transmitted. The Commission (Eurostat) shall assess the quality of data transmitted and publish the reports.