The Statistics Questionnaire in Georgia: What Geostat Sends You, and What Happens If You Ignore It

Most business owners in Georgia meet Geostat by accident. A letter or an email arrives from the National Statistics Office of Georgia (Sakstat), attaching a form with dozens of rows about turnover, employees, wages, fixed assets and inventories. It looks like a tax filing. It is not one. It comes from a different agency, under a different law, with its own deadline, and ignoring it carries its own penalty.

Here is what the statistical questionnaire actually is, who receives one, and how to handle it.

What the questionnaire is

Geostat produces Georgia's official statistics: GDP, business sector output, employment and wages, investment, energy, tourism. It builds those numbers partly from administrative sources (tax data, customs, the business register) and partly by asking companies directly.

The direct part is the statistical survey. Geostat draws a sample from its business register and sends each selected unit a questionnaire covering a reference quarter or year. Your answers are aggregated with everyone else's and published as sector totals. Nothing you submit appears anywhere with your company name attached.

Completing the questionnaire is free, and so is asking Geostat for help completing it. There is no fee and no filing charge.

The legal basis

The current Law of Georgia on Official Statistics was adopted on 31 May 2023 and entered into force on 30 August 2023, replacing the law of 11 December 2009. It was drafted to align Georgia's statistical framework with the European Statistics Code of Practice and the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.

Article 25 of that law sets out the respondent's position, and it is worth reading closely because it answers most of the questions businesses actually have:

• Legal entities registered in the Register of Entrepreneurial and Non-Commercial Legal Entities must provide Geostat, on written request (including electronic request), with the information available to them, in paper or electronic form. This includes confidential information.
• Participation in a statistical survey is mandatory for a selected respondent. There is no opt-out.
• The data submitted must be reliable and complete, in the form Geostat prescribes.
• Deadlines are set by Geostat according to the periodicity of each survey, but may never be shorter than 7 calendar days from delivery of the request.
• An electronic notice sent to the email address registered in the entrepreneurial register counts as officially delivered. If you have not checked that address in two years, that is your problem, not Geostat's.
• Refusing to accept the letter counts as delivery.
• Failure to provide the information triggers liability under the Code of Administrative Offences of Georgia.
• Paying the penalty does not cancel the obligation. You still have to file.

Geostat itself draws up the administrative offence record and files it in court. It is not a self-assessed fine that appears on your Revenue Service account.

Confidentiality is a statutory duty, not a courtesy

The single most common reason businesses stall on the questionnaire is the fear that it is a back door into a tax audit. It is not. Chapter IX of the law is strict:

• Data that allows direct or indirect identification of a statistical unit is confidential. Aggregates covering only 1 to 3 units are treated as confidential for the same reason, and the Executive Director can extend that protection to larger aggregates.
• Confidential data may be used only for producing statistics. Dissemination for any non-statistical purpose is prohibited.
• Individual data may be published only with the written consent of the statistical unit.
• Paper questionnaires containing identifiers are destroyed within three months of publication of the results.

Geostat cannot hand your individual figures to the Revenue Service as a tax lead.

Who receives one

Selection is by sample, not by application. If you are registered in Georgia and economically active, you can be selected. In practice:

• Large enterprises are typically surveyed every period, because they carry too much weight in the aggregates to be estimated.
• Small and medium enterprises are sampled, and the sample rotates. Being selected this year does not mean you will be selected next year, and skipping a year does not mean you have been dropped.
• Individual entrepreneurs receive their own simplified form.
• Non-commercial legal entities (NNLEs, foundations, associations) are surveyed separately.
• Dormant companies are still expected to respond. A nil return is a valid answer and takes minutes. Silence is not.

Censuses are a separate matter. Under Article 29, participation in a census is mandatory for every natural and legal person, with no sampling involved.

The main questionnaire types

Geostat publishes its business questionnaires openly, so you can look at yours before it lands. The core set:

If you operate in one of those sectors, expect the general enterprise survey plus a sector form.

Deadlines

There is no single national statistics deadline. Each survey carries its own, and the date you must meet is the one written on the request you received, not one you find in a general article. Two anchors:

• The statutory floor is 7 calendar days from delivery. In practice Geostat allows longer, but a short notice period is lawful.
• Annual surveys are typically due in the spring or early summer following the reference year. The survey of enterprises engaged in financial activities, for example, has carried a 20 May deadline.

Read the cover page of the form. It states the deadline, the reference period and the territorial office that handles your submission.

How to submit

Three routes exist, and which one applies depends on the survey and on how Geostat contacted you.

1. 1.Online. Geostat's respondent portal at questionnaires.geostat.ge. This is the default for most business surveys now, and it validates entries as you go, which cuts down on rejected submissions.
2. 2.Territorial office. Paper or electronic submission to the regional subdivision named on your form.
3. 3.Interviewer visit. Some surveys, particularly household, tourism and agricultural surveys, are collected in person.

Geostat also publishes a fieldwork calendar at surveycalendar.geostat.ge showing which surveys are in the field and when.

The penalty for not responding

Non-submission is an administrative offence under Article 177¹² of the Code of Administrative Offences of Georgia. The structure is two-stage. The first part provides for a warning together with an obligation to submit the information within one month. The second part applies where the business still fails to comply, and carries a fine. Geostat's own reporting on enforcement cites GEL 200 as the amount under the second part.

Two qualifications, stated plainly. First, GEL 200 is not the real cost. The real cost is that the file stays open, the warning is on record, the obligation to file survives the fine under Article 25(9), and repeat non-response invites more attention than one afternoon of data entry ever would. Second, penalty provisions are amended periodically and the figure above could not be verified against the live consolidated text of the Code at the time of writing. Before relying on the amount, check Article 177¹² on matsne.gov.ge or ask your advisor.

Where businesses get this wrong

Practical approach

Assign the questionnaire to whoever holds your accounting records, not to whoever opens the post. Keep the completed form and the submission confirmation with your accounting file for the year. When the next quarterly form arrives, the previous one is your template and the exercise takes minutes instead of hours.

For companies whose accounting is outsourced, confirm in writing whether statistical reporting sits inside or outside the engagement. It frequently falls between the client and the accountant, which is exactly how a warning happens.

EFS Group handles Geostat statistical reporting alongside accounting, tax compliance, and SARAS financial statements for companies and individual entrepreneurs in Georgia.

This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. Deadlines, questionnaire content and penalty amounts change. Verify the current position against your specific request from Geostat and the current text of the relevant legislation.