The Department of Statistics, Malaysia (DOSM) was established in 1949 under the Statistics Ordinance 1949 and was then known as Bureau of Statistics. The Statistics Ordinance 1949 was replaced by the Statistics Act 1965. Under this Act, the Bureau of Statistics was known as the Department of Statistics, headed by the Chief Statistician. The Statistics Act 1965 was revised in 1989. The functions of the Department are explicitly defined under Section 2(2):
“The functions of the Department shall be to collect and interpret statistics for the purpose of furnishing information required in the formation or carrying out the Government policy in any field or otherwise required for Government purposes or for meeting the needs of trade, commerce, industry or agriculture (including forestry, fishing and hunting)”.
In 1965, DOSM comprised 12 divisions at the Headquarters, Kuala Lumpur and two branch offices in Sabah and Sarawak. The total staff then was 363 persons, of which 313 were at the Headquarters, 20 in Sabah and 30 in Sarawak. In tandem with the country’s economic development and increasing demand for statistical information, a series of restructuring exercises were undertaken with the latest in 2007. With this restructuring, DOSM was organised into three programmes namely Management/Coordination Services Programme (MCSP), Social/Demographic Programme (SDP) and Economic Programme (EP) consisting 19 divisions at the Headquarters, 14 State Offices and 28 Operational Centres. Currently, DOSM has a staff strength of 3,314.
In general, the function of MCSP is to provide support services to the Divisions and State Offices with regards to human resource management, finance, information technology, user services and matters related to the implementation of censuses/surveys. The SDP and EP are responsible for preparing and analysing social/demographic and economic statistics while the State Offices and Operational Centres are responsible for data collection, processing and data quality control. The organisational structure of Department of Statistics, Malaysia is shown in Chart 1.
