In October 2019, an updated Memorandum of Understanding (PDF 282KB) was signed between the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and the Companies Registration Office (CRO). The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by Mr. Pádraig Dalton, Director-General of the CSO, and Ms. Maureen O’Sullivan, the Registrar of Companies.
The MoU formally enhances data cooperation between the CSO and the CRO. The MoU acknowledges that enhanced data cooperation between the CSO and the CRO, as well as fulfilling new statistical requirements of European legislation, has the potential to reduce the administrative burden on business.
The MoU reaffirms the CSO undertaking that all data received from the CRO are treated as strictly confidential and are used for statistical purposes only, in accordance with the Statistics Act, 1993 and Regulation (EC) No. 223/2009 on European statistics.
The adoption of this MoU between the CSO and the CRO follows a number of similar agreements between the CSO and other Government bodies in recent years. These agreements reflect a realigning of processes within the CSO to ensure a more systematic use of the administrative data with statistical potential held by other Government bodies. It is an ongoing corporate goal of the CSO to maximise the use of administrative data for statistical purposes, in order to reduce the overall administrative burden on businesses and generate enhanced statistical outputs in support of evidence-based policy making.