Surveys for special purposes

(1) To meet a short-term data need of supreme federal authorities, federal statistics may be conducted without an obligation to provide information where a supreme federal authority requests such a federal statistic.
(2) To clarify scientific-methodological questions in the field of statistics, federal statistics may be conducted without an obligation to provide information.
(3) The Federal Statistical Office is entitled to conduct the federal statistics under subsections (1) and (2), insofar as, in the cases under subsection (1), this is not done by the statistical offices of the Länder within the time limits set by the supreme federal authorities, and, in the cases under subsection (2), is not done by the statistical offices of the Länder themselves.
(4) Federal statistics under subsections (1) and (2) may each cover data from no more than 20,000 respondents.
(5) Repeat surveys are also permissible for the purpose of depicting a trend, for up to five years after the first survey.
(6) The Federal Statistical Office and the statistical offices of the Länder may, in preparing and conducting federal statistics under subsections (1) and (2), take measures under section 6(1) sentence 1 number 1 without an obligation to provide information; section 6(1) sentence 4 applies accordingly. Data from the preliminary survey may be used, in aggregated form, to process these federal statistics for extrapolations.