Dispatch 242/GM/99 (Extract)

Confidentiality of Statistics and Approval of Official Statistics Dissemination

All employees of the Statistical Information System of Macao (SIEM) and all public entities who have participated in any way in any part of the statistical activities of SIEM must not disclose to any third party any individual statistical information obtained thereby nor use the information for non-statistical purposes.

It is the responsibility of the persons in charge of the stages from data collection, manual processing of questionnaires, electronical processing of questionnaires to dissemination of information to lay down necessary measures and procedures to ensure the individual statistical information is protected, properly stored and destroyed, not being tampered with and not being lost in transit, and the identification of the information providers is not disclosed directly or indirectly upon information dissemination.

Any person in violation of statistical confidentiality will be subject to civil and disciplinary liabilities according to the general regulations and will be subject to criminal liabilities according to Article 189 of the Penal Code of Macao.

In addition, to further safeguard statistical confidentiality, it is required that a related topic must be included in the agenda of the ordinary meetings of Consultative Committee of Statistics (CCE). The organizations within SIEM shall submit a report to CCE for this purpose.

Before disseminating any information as official, entities with authority to perform statistics or entities outside the organizations of statistics compilation of SIEM must have their questionnaires or instruments for recording individual primary information registered with DSEC, and submit an application along with a proposed publication plan, any difficulties foreseen when the statistical activity is performed and corresponding solutions, and expected accuracy of the result for DSEC’s approval.

DSEC may then exercise its discretion to grant approval of information dissemination, taking into consideration of the technical aspect of the statistical result, compliance with statistical confidentiality and validity of the registration of questionnaires or instruments for recording individual primary information.