Agencies such as the Inland Revenue Board (IRB) and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) may soon be compelled to provide more detailed information to the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM).

This possibility has been raised by the Statistics Act 1965 being reviewed to give the department’s chief statistician more power.

“We are going for the empowerment of DOSM in terms of data coordination because the Act is actually quite old. That’s why we’d have to look at a total review of the Act.

“For example, we are going to really do the data tapping into MACC’s records, IRB, Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF), Ministry of Education…

“At the moment, it is not that they don’t give cooperation, but because they have their own Act, which won’t allow them to share,” DOSM’s chief statistician Mohd Uzir Mahidin said today.

He said government agencies have no qualms about sharing aggregated data, but would not share more granular, individual data.

"If they only give one aggregate (number), we only know the forest but not the tree. We already know the forest, now we want to see the tree so we'd know what kind of tree is it," Mohd Uzir told reporters when met in Kuala Lumpur.

Earlier today, he was attending the launch of the World Bank’s Malaysia Economic Monitor report themed “Data for Development”, and spoke as a panellist at a forum in conjunction with the launch.

As an example of a good data sharing arrangement, Uzir said the National Registration Department now forwards a copy of each birth certificate and death certificate it issues to DOSM, which then calculates figures such as fertility rates, birth rates, death rates and life expectancy.

The department now releases monthly life and death rate figures at the district level. Its upcoming edition of the household expenditure survey would also provide district-level data for the first time, instead of the previous practice of releasing state-level data.

Another example, he said, is that the Royal Customs Department now sends data on imports and exports automatically to DOSM.

Uzir said the department is looking to employ fewer support staff such as enumerators and more technical staff like statisticians, as it shifts from its reliance on gathering survey data to analysing administrative data.

At the moment, he said technical staff only make up 13 percent of the department, compared to 65 percent with its foreign counterparts.

Meanwhile, Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming who also attended the launch lauded the move to give the chief statistician more power.

However, he said data should not be thought of only in numbers, but also in terms of government reports such as the East Coast Rail Line’s (ECRL) environmental impact assessment report, which is undergoing a public feedback period but is not available online.

He also urged DOSM to go further such as providing anonymised data at the individual or household level, which would aid in conducting economic research.

The World Bank report noted that nearly all academics it surveyed reported that the granularity of the available data is currently inadequate for rigorous economic research.

It said Malaysia ranks 53 out of 114 countries on its Open Data Barometer as of last year, and the government has made 2,025 datasets available on its open data portal as of June 1 this year. The government’s aim is to make 7,000 datasets available by 2020.

Meanwhile, the minister in charge of the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) Abdul Rahman Dahlan, who officiated the report’s launch, said he looks forward to seeing district-level data from DOSM.

This would be useful to both local governments for its planning, and for local politicians, and hoped that the people would be excited about local statistics being made available too.

“Wouldn't it be nice to know, for example, the unemployment rate of my constituency, or the inflation rate of my constituency, and all the economic statistics of my constituency, and therefore the local governments in my constituencies would be able to come up with a formulation of policies that are more relevant to the people on the ground.

“And for local politicians like me, I would rather be very busy with local statistics than national statistics, which may not be quite relevant to them.