This paper examines how digitalization is reshaping trust in official statistics across production, dissemination, and use. The paper distinguishes between trust and trustworthiness. It sets out five system-wide strategies for building trust: strengthening credibility through professional independence and honest handling of revisions; enhancing transparency around methods, data sources, and limitations; improving accessibility and statistical literacy; upholding ethical integrity through visible data governance and confidentiality safeguards; and building the institutional and human capacity needed to sustain all of the above. Throughout, the paper is anchored in the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, the UN National Quality Assurance Framework (UN-NQAF), and the European Statistics Code of Practice
This framework is highly relevant to EGRISS’s work. Its discussion of trustworthy data governance for administrative, integrated, and AI-assisted data sources speaks directly to the challenges national statistical systems face when producing statistics on displaced and stateless populations, where data are often sensitive, drawn from registration or administrative systems, and require careful confidentiality and coordination safeguards. Likewise, its attention to the risk that digital data sources can underrepresent groups who are weakly covered by administrative systems reinforces a core concern of the IRRS, IRIS, and IROSS: ensuring that refugees, IDPs, and stateless persons are not rendered statistically invisible. NSOs implementing the EGRISS recommendations may find the paper’s five trust-building strategies a useful complementary lens for embedding transparency, accessibility, and ethical safeguards into their forced displacement and statelessness statistics work.
