Mr Beck, this year 830,000 Hessians are to answer questions about their age, citizenship or living situation. Why is this necessary?
Like a company, the state is dependent on a kind of data inventory being made from time to time. For example, while there are population registers, these registers are not always up-to-date or error-free. And the census is also necessary because it is an international standard and since 2006 the EU has stipulated that the member states have to carry out a census every ten years.
The word census brings back memories of the controversial 1987 census.
There are big differences between the current census and the census from back then. Based on the experience of the 1987 census and the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court, we are using the new procedure of the register-based census. Since 2011, we have not interviewed everyone like we did in 1987, but only ten to twelve percent of the population, in order to relieve the rest of the population of surveys. We have developed a procedure so that the data quality of a census is still achieved.
What does register-based mean?
This means that we make sure that we primarily draw data from administrative registers. However, we know that the population registers, for example, are not error-free. That is why we need a procedure that enables us to check the quality of these registers, for example to determine the true number of inhabitants. To do this, we take a sample of ten to twelve percent of the population.
Why isn’t it digital these days? Why is an expensive and time-consuming survey still necessary?
We cannot match registers that do not exist. For example, there is no database that records what educational qualifications the population has, or the stock of condominiums and buildings. The registers are not even prepared for a purely digital data comparison. This requires a legislative reform of the federal government, which was started last year. That was too late for the current census, but will hopefully be completed in time for the next census in 2031.
Now, not only census data is collected from apartment owners, but the tax authorities also collect data for the reform of the property tax.
In fact, it was probably a bit confusing and a bit unfortunate that the tax authorities are now planning a new calculation basis for the property tax in addition to the census. But that is not in our hands. The legislature is responsible for this.
Concerns about privacy are regularly raised when it comes to the government collecting citizen data. How are these taken into account?
As a result of the census ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, data protection is an essential element of our work. We also closely coordinate our procedures with our own data protection officer and that of the state of Hesse. Before the 1983 judgment, for example, it was still possible to send the personal data collected as part of the census back to the municipalities so that they could then use this data to correct their population registers. This is now no longer allowed. We cannot say that Mr. X is recorded in one register with this data and in the other register with that data. That’s out of the question. We only publish aggregated values.
How quickly is data made anonymous?
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