The Danish insurance and pension industry is required to report to public sector authorities 814 times a year, mapping by the country's Ministry of Digital Affairs has found.

It is the first time a comprehensive mapping of Danish companies' reports to government authorities has been compiled. It was prepared by the agency as part of the 'MyBusiness' initiative from the agreement on Denmark's digitalisation strategy 2024-2027, and is intended to form the basis for initiatives that can ease companies' burdens.

The reporting burden of the insurance and pensions industry is particularly high when compared to other sectors, such as the hotel industry, which reports to public authorities just once a year, and energy companies, which report 72 times a year.

Currently, the Danish insurance and pensions industry is subject to quarterly European reporting requirements, reporting up to over 250,000 data points. In addition to the European requirements, there are a large number of national reporting requirements to various Danish authorities.

Insurance and Pension Denmark (I&P Denmark) deputy director, Torben Weiss Garne, argued that the pension and insurance industry's overall reporting requirements were now so extensive that it was time to “stop and ensure balance.”

“Our industry is subject to many industry-specific reports, and that's how it should be. Regulation and reporting are important when they lead to better consumer protection.

"But it's important to always keep in mind whether the beneficial effects are reasonably proportional to the costs of complying with the regulation,” he continued.

“Our industry has continuously been subject to increasing reporting requirements, and existing requirements are rarely removed when new ones are introduced.”

Weiss Garne called on the authorities to stop, look across the board, and ensure the reporting framework was correct.

“We are happy to contribute to more cross-cutting work, focusing on simplifying the industry's reporting to the authorities, which would benefit both companies and individual insurance and pension customers," Garne explained, but stressed that the authorities 'should become better' at sharing data to a greater extent and taking the data already available via EU reports as their basis.

"There must be an end to silo thinking and an end to taking as a basis what information one is authorised to obtain and looking more closely at whether the authorities can cover their needs with data that already exists," he added.

More broadly, the mapping found that Danish companies make over 200 million reports to 1,874 different self-service solutions every year.

Danish Minister for Digitalisation, Caroline Stage, commented: "The government's reporting requirements have gotten out of hand and have become too heavy an administrative burden for our companies. The new mapping clearly shows the need for us to work hard to simplify and automate much more.

"Danish companies should spend their precious time developing new, innovative products and creating jobs, not on filing reports and filling out PDF files."

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