Combination of data

Insofar as necessary to obtain statistical information without additional statistical surveys, and to fulfil the purposes under section 13(1), the following data may be combined:
1. data from economic and environmental statistics of undertakings, establishments and places of work, including from statistics produced by the Deutsche Bundesbank,
2. data from the statistics register,
3. data under the Administrative Data Use Act,
4. data that the statistical offices of the Federation and the Länder obtain from generally accessible sources, and
5. data of supreme federal authorities that they have collected to fulfil statistical reporting obligations under European Union law, or that were collected for that purpose on their behalf. For combinations under sentence 1, the Deutsche Bundesbank may transmit data from the economic statistics it produces to the Federal Statistical Office. For combinations under sentence 1, the supreme federal authorities and the bodies commissioned by them may transmit the data referred to in sentence 1 number 5 to the Federal Statistical Office. Insofar as the data combined under sentence 1 number 5 contain characteristics serving to identify units in the statistics register under section 13(1), those characteristics shall be deleted by the Federal Statistical Office at the latest four years after transmission of the data. For combinations under sentence 1, reference numbers under section 1(1) sentence 4 of the Statistics Register Act may be stored, in the data sets containing the survey characteristics, for up to 30 years. On expiry of the storage period, the reference numbers must be deleted. The period begins on completion of the respective survey.