The European Statistical System Committee adopted Code of Practice the  on 28 September 2011. The Code is intended for the European statistical institutions like Eurostat and the European Central Bank, for national statistical institutes as well as other statistical bodies in charge of producing European official statistics.

The Code of Practice is mainly unchanged since its original version from 2005. The current version, however, puts more emphasis on the statistical institution's independency and the quality of the statistics.

European quality review – ESS Peer review

To ensure that European statistics is of high quality, regular assessments are carried out for all the national statistical authorities of the EU and EFTA countries. These assessments are called ESS peer reviews and were carried out for Norway in 2008, 2014 and 2021.

The objective of the peer reviews is to assess European statistical authorities’ compliance with the principles and indicators of the Code of Practice.

In the ESS peer review, an international evaluation team, organized by Eurostat, gains insight into the production of national statistics through documents, self-assessments and talks with Statistics Norway, other national producers of European statistics, the media and other users of official statistics. In 2021, the other Norwegian producers of statistics assessed were the Directorate of Immigration, the Directorate of Fisheries, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, all of which report statistics to Eurostat. The recommendations from the evaluation team should help statistical authorities further improve and develop their statistical systems.