How a 14M-row French business registry study enforced airtight data accuracy

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Researchers analyzing France's official SIRENE business registry — covering 14.4 million active establishments — built a strict reconciliation process requiring every percentage to trace back to a independently verified total. The discipline caught an early error in workforce classification, where incorrect INSEE status codes produced figures several percentage points off the true combined count of 12,557,762 establishments with no declared staff. Geographic breakdowns required careful handling of messy postal codes, with over 195,000 rows explicitly accounted for as excluded rather than silently dropped. The top sector by establishment count, real estate, turned out to reflect a legal-structure artifact — property-holding shells called SCIs — rather than genuine economic activity, prompting the team to re-examine every ranking for similar distortions. The study's core lesson is that reconciling query results against known anchor totals before rounding or reporting is what separates defensible published figures from ones that quietly obscure data quality issues.

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