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BUSINESS REGISTER UNIT

OBJECTIVES

The Business Register Program maintains the ABS Business Register which is a list of organisations that participate in Australia's formal economy, with structural and classification information about each organisation. The data on the ABS Business Register are used to: provide frames for ABS economic collections; provide information to support ABS economic survey processes; support the ABS Business Demography program; and facilitate the integration of direct collect and administrative economic data within the ABS.

The data on the ABS Business Register are primarily sourced from the Australian Business Register (ABR), the Australian Tax Office (ATO) and via ABS profiling of large, complex businesses. The unit record information on the ABS Business Register is not available for release outside of ABS.

OUTPUTS

The main outputs derived from the ABS Business Register are:

• survey frames for use in ABS economic data collection
• information to support ABS economic survey processes including data editing
• a dataset that is the main input to the annual publication Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits (cat. no. 8165.0). This publication provides data relevant to users interested in understanding businesses that actively trade in goods or services
• aggregate business structure reports for internal analysis and research and to meet client requests by Australian and state government agencies and industry associations at the aggregate level
• infrastructure to support the use of administrative economic data.

• adopt electronic reporting for administrative data - due December 2014
• provide technical assistance on Business Registers to countries in Asia and the Pacific Region - due December 2015
• work with the ABR and ATO to promote quality in ABR and ATO indicator series - ongoing
• make improvements to ABS Business Register systems to enhance the quality of business structure data and enable integration of datasets in line with corporate developments - ongoing
• adopt electronic reporting for direct collect data - as resources permit
• geo-spatially enable the ABS Business Register - as resources permit.