1. For the purpose of this Regulation, the following quality criteria shall apply to the statistics to be transmitted:
‘relevance’, which refers to the degree to which statistics meet current and potential needs of the users;
‘accuracy’, which refers to the closeness of estimates to the unknown true values;
‘timeliness’, which refers to the period between the availability of the information and the event or phenomenon it describes;
‘punctuality’, which refers to the delay between the date of release of the data and the target date (the date by which the data should have been delivered);
‘accessibility’ and ‘clarity’, which refer to the conditions and modalities by which users can obtain, use and interpret data;
‘comparability’, which refers to the measurement of the impact of differences in applied statistical concepts, measurement tools and procedures when statistics are compared between geographical areas, sectoral domains or over time;
‘coherence’, which refers to the adequacy of the data to be reliably combined in different ways and for various uses.
2. Member States shall provide the Commission (Eurostat) with a report on the quality of the statistics transmitted every year.
3. In applying the quality criteria laid down in paragraph 1 of this Article to the statistics covered by this Regulation, the modalities and structure of the quality reports shall be defined in accordance with the procedure referred to in Article 11(2). The Commission (Eurostat) shall assess the quality of the statistics transmitted.