The Business Statistics directorate, within the National Statistics Office (NSO), is responsible for the collection of data from businesses.
Around 9,000 enterprises are surveyed out of an active business population of 30,000 enterprises. The units are categorised according to their size class of employment and the principal activity (NACE). There are also a number of infra-annual statistics compilations for business enterprises which are one pager questionnaires mainly dealing with employment, turnover, production and prices. These are collected very frequently, as these are used to assess the whole economy. These questionnaires are split monthly for manufacturing and are disseminated quarterly to wholesale and retail and services sectors firms.
Business Entities requiring to submit company data to the NSO are contacted by email or by post to submit the data either online or using a paper questionnaire. In this communication, the business entity is given a deadline by when the data should be submitted.
Thus, the delivery timelines to submit the company data are indicated by the deadline provided in the email/letter. Note that it is the responsibility of the business entity to submit the data. Once the data is submitted, the NSO is not required to respond but may revert in case of any queries on the submitted data within 3 to 5 working days from submission.
Registered businesses may submit the surveys online here.
To access the online business surveys, click here. For SBS and Intrastat applications, submissions can be lengthy and in those cases, the respondent can save the questionnaire as draft and resume later. For eSTS and Accomstat, the questionnaire is shorter, so this feature is not available. For Intrastat, the length of the declaration depends on the number of goods imported and/or exported by the trader, which can vary from one item to thousands. Thus, the time to complete the declaration varies. Traders have also the option to upload the data in XML format for large declarations to reduce the time taken to submit the declaration form.
Contact Details:
National Statistics Office
Business Statistics Directorate
Mr Manuel Tabone - Director
Tel: +35625997505
Email: manuel.tabone@gov.mt
last updated Jan 2023