Business Register Data are mainly composed of information collected through surveys as well as administrative data .
Basic administrative data are provided by old age and survivors' insurance (OASI), value added tax (VAT) and data on imports and exports obtained from Federal Customs Administration (FCA) in accordance with Art. 4 of the Federal Statistics Act (FStatA). These data feed into the Business and Enterprise Register (BER) data and are made available to the various producers of statistics at the FSO.
It is not possible to satisfy statistical production needs with administrative data alone. Various surveys conducted by the FSO supplement these data. Simple enterprises, for example, are updated in the Business and Enterprise Register using the Initial Survey of Business Start-Ups (ERST only available in French) while multi-establishment enterprises are updated using the Profiling Light (PL only available in French) survey.
