OFR Offers Best-Practice Tips For Regulatory Data Collection

The Office of Financial Research ("OFR") issued guidance to regulators for collecting comprehensive and high-quality data for financial stability analysis, market monitoring, and policymaking. The guidance covers (i) the preparation of data, (ii) data transmission processes, (iii) data quality and (iv) common pitfalls in regulatory data collection.

The guidance recommends the following practices for regulators:

• define the business purpose for collecting data,
• design a template in order to establish the standard for developing data collection,
• develop clear and precise definitions, and
• create specifications for the data collection process.

Commentary

Here are a few more recommendations to add to the OFR's list: (i) consider the costs of collecting the information, (ii) determine whether the means of requesting information are standardized adequately to yield comparable data from different sources, (iii) determine whether the means of transmitting the