Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 164: To ask the Taoiseach if his attention has been drawn to the burden created for small employers of completing the national employment survey; and if he has proposals to reduce the compliance cost for employers of providing this information. [12072/08]

Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)
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The National Employment Survey (NES) is an annual survey of employers and employees in both the public and private sectors, covering all sectors of the economy. The NES provides valuable information on the structure and distribution of employee earnings, and on the factors influencing earnings and employment conditions, to meet national and EU needs.

The CSO recognises that the survey imposes a burden, particularly on small employers when they are included in the survey. Steps have been taken and continue to be taken to keep this burden to a minimum. These include: the NES has an innovative survey approach which involves information being collected in respect of individual employees from both the employer and employee themselves. In total it has an annual sample of approximately 10,000 employers and 100,000 employees. However only employers with greater than 249 employees are included every year with a rotating systematic sample of smaller employers (employers with less than three employees are excluded from the survey entirely), depending on the size of the employer. For example, employers with between two and ten employees have a one in twenty chance of inclusion in the survey while employers with between nine and twenty employees have a one in ten chance of inclusion in the survey etc. Once an employer has been included in the survey, it is rotated out of the sample for subsequent years and is not included again until other employers in the same category have been sampled, except in certain limited circumstances. In addition, the CSO has been working in consultation with payroll software providers to reduce the burden of response on enterprises. These payroll companies have installed an optional CSO "module" on their payroll packages which will extract all the payroll data required for the NES (and the new quarterly Earnings, Hours and Employment Costs Survey or EHECS). This innovation will lead to a significant reduction in burden on those companies using the modules. The modules are currently been rolled out by the payroll companies and will be available for the NES from next year onwards.