The Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act, ("CIPSEA"), is a

United States federal law The law of the United States comprises many levels of codified and uncodified forms of law, of which the most important is the nation's Constitution, which prescribes the foundation of the federal government of the United States, as well as va ...

enacted in 2002 as Title V of the

E-Government Act of 2002 The E-Government Act of 2002 (, , , H.R. 2458/S. 803), is a United States statute enacted on 17 December 2002, with an effective date for most provisions of 17 April 2003. Its stated purpose is to improve the management and promotion of electronic ...

(, , ). CIPSEA establishes uniform confidentiality protections for information collected for statistical purposes by U.S. statistical agencies, and it allows some

data sharing Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are consid ...

between the

Bureau of Labor Statistics The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a unit of the United States Department of Labor. It is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics and serves as a principal agency of t ...

Bureau of Economic Analysis The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the United States Department of Commerce is a U.S. government agency that provides official economy of the United States, macroeconomic and industry statistics, most notably reports about the gross domestic ...

, and

Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau (USCB), officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The Census Bureau is part of the ...

. The agencies report to OMB on particular actions related to confidentiality and data sharing. The law gives the agencies standardized approaches to protecting information from

respondent {{unreferenced, date=February 2012 A respondent is a person who is called upon to issue a response to a communication made by another. The term is used in legal contexts, in survey methodology, and in psychological conditioning. Legal usage In ...

s so that it will not be exposed in ways that lead to inappropriate or surprising identification of the respondent. By default the respondent's data is used for ''statistical purposes'' only. If the respondent gives ''informed consent'', the data can be put to some other use. CIPSEA did not give the statistical agencies new opportunities to use federal data on business taxes in combination with the other sources for statistical purposes. Such data is protected by

Title 26 The Internal Revenue Code (IRC), formally the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, is the domestic portion of federal statutory tax law in the United States, published in various volumes of the United States Statutes at Large, and separately as Title 26 ...

and new laws would be required to enable the other agencies to use such data, which could help them improve the classifications of business into industries and thus improve the accuracy of industry statistics. Later proposals address this prospect. A reauthorization of CIPSEA in 2018-19 gave the statistical agencies more opportunities to use administrative data for statistical purposes, and required them to more deeply analyze risks to privacy and confidentiality of respondents.Nick Hart
New Law Offers Reforms to Improve Access to Data, Confidentiality Protections
''Amstat News'' blog,

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

site, 1 Feb 2019

References

{{Reflist Acts of the 107th United States Congress United States federal government administration legislation