In 2007, the Act on an Income Register was adopted in Denmark. The Act is administered by the Danish tax authorities. The law requires that all public and private employers as well as public authorities report income payments to citizens at least once a month. The reporting includes detailed information on the size of the amount, type of the payment, where the employee is working and the number of working hours covered by the payment. Type of transfer payments is also registered.

Collection and storage of these data in one register is a storehouse of information for statistical purposes and opens up a wide variety of possibilities. Access to the wide range of sensitive personal data is strongly restricted, but Statistics Denmark has special legal access provided that data is used for statistical purposes only.

Having access to a wide range of income data collected in one source gives a qualitatively great advantage as the statistics produced on the basis of this source become comparable. This is of special interest in this case as the eIncome Register will become the statistical source to short-term as well as long-term statistics.

However, as data is not collected by the Tax Authorities for statistical reasons, we have spent much time on refining the data to make them suitable for producing statistics. Moreover, the data comes in very large quantities, including corrections to formerly reporting of data which has giving us special challenges. Our aim is to refine the data as much as possible centrally in the eIncome Register to ensure a consistent data base with a reasonably high data quality and to save time in the subsequent statistical producing phases.

Keywords: Income register; Electronic income register; eIncome

Biography: Born in 1954.

1981: Graduate in Economics

1981–1986: Danish Export Credit Counsil

1986–1989: Oil Company Industry

1989–2000: Commercial and Business School

2000–2008: Statistics Denmark, Industrial Statistics

2008–present: Statistics Denmark, Project Manager in Labour Market