Council Regulation (EU) 2015/373 of 5 March 2015

What it is

to amend Regulation (EC) No 2533/98 concerning the collection of statistical information by the European Central Bank. ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: the Council adopts the act after consulting the European Parliament but without being obliged to follow its opinion. BACKGROUND: Council Regulation (EC) No 2533/98 is a key component in the legal framework supporting the statistical information collection tasks of the European Central Bank (ECB) assisted by the national central banks (NCB). The ECB has consistently relied on this Regulation to carry out and monitor the coordinated collection of statistical information necessary to undertake the tasks of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), including the task of contributing to the smooth conduct of policies pursued by the competent authorities relating to the prudential supervision of credit institutions and the stability of the financial system. The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs adopted in the framework of a special legislative procedure (Parliament’s consultation), the report by Roberto GUALTIERI (S&D, IT) on the draft Council regulation amending Regulation (EC) No 2533/98 concerning the collection of statistical information by the European Central Bank. The committee approved the draft proposed in the recommendation of the European Central Bank (ECB) which aims to amend Regulation (EC) 2533/98 with a view to taking into account the ECB’s new supervisory tasks under Regulation (EU) No 1024/2013 conferring specific tasks on the European Central Bank concerning policies relating to the prudential supervision of credit institutions ( SSM regulation ). It has introduced a number of amendments aiming to clarify the following issues: any exemption of reporting agents shall be in the form of a motivated written decision. In addition, the decision shall be transparent and hence public; the ECB shall respect the principle of proportionality in the definition and imposition of statistical reporting requirements; the right of verification is not necessarily exhausted with the right to access documents, books and records; the ECB shall have access to paper and computer databases containing unprocessed data points for the conduct on comparative statistical analyses; it is important to distinguish when imposing sanctions the types of misconduct and whether the infringement is intentional or negligent. Hence, incorrect information should refer to errors and not to intentional falsification or tampering; the ex-post falsification of data after submission of statistical information should be included amongst the bad faith conducts. Lastly, Members considered that that such significant empowerment to transmit confidential data to a number of authorities needs to be balanced by a requirement of the receiving authorities to take all necessary regulatory, administrative, technical and organisational measures to ensure the physical and logical protection of the confidential statistical information concerned. The European Parliament adopted by 541 votes to 98, with 49 abstentions, in the framework of a special legislative procedure (Parliament’s consultation), a legislative…

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