Boomerang Effect of Quality Control on the Compilation of Financial Accounts and Flow of Funds: the Experience of Banco de Portugal

Abstract

Financial Accounts are fundamental to monitor financial stability by quantifying the impact of financial decisions of a host of economic agents. In Portugal, the compilation of these statistics is a responsibility of Banco de Portugal. One of the main purposes of the Statistics Department of Banco de Portugal is to ensure this statistical production with high quality standards, aiming at fully meeting user’s needs, by developing a wide set of quality control procedures. In this context, Banco de Portugal developed a multidisciplinary team with experts from financial accounts and from the different underlying primary statistics. Within this format, that can be viewed as a “boomerang effect”, all team members are co-responsible for producing national financial accounts, on a bottom-up approach, thus improving both the quality of these statistics, as well as the quality of primary statistics. This is the result of a systematic iterative process of data cross-check and reconciliation which may represent an opportunity to validate the soundness of microdata, on a top-down approach.

Keywords

• Quality control
• financial accounts
• multidisciplinary team
• data cross-check
• flow of funds