Our mission is to provide and disseminate statistical information, which is objective, independent and of high quality. This information is made available to everybody: politicians, government, administration, businessmen and citizens. The federal law on statistics specifies the duties and responsibilities of the federal statistical office.
In line with the federal structure of the state and the administration in the Federal Republic of Germany federation-wide surveys of official statistics ("federal statistical surveys") are implemented in cooperation between the Federal Statistical Office and the statistical offices of the 16 federal states. That means that in most cases federal statistical surveys are organised in a decentralised manner. This implies a division of labour in which the main function of the Federal Statistical Office is coordination. Its principal responsibility is to see to it that federal statistical surveys are without overlaps, comply with standard methods and observe the time schedule. The Federal Statistical Office's catalogue of obligations includes activities such as
- methodological and technical preparations for the various statistical surveys,
- further development of the federal statistics programme,
- mutual coordination of statistical surveys
- compilation and publication of federal results.
Data collection and data processing up to federal state level is predominantly carried out by the statistical offices of the federal states.
The organisation chart shows the distribution of the Federal Statistical Office's responsibilities. The office is headed by a President and a Vice-President. The President of the Federal Statistical Office is traditionally also Federal Returning Officer and as such responsible for the elections to Germany's federal parliament and the European Parliament as well as for the statement of election results.