The former Chairman and the following one are co-chairmen. When the Chairman of the Council is temporary absent one of his co-chairmen is entrusted with his duties. In the period between the meetings of the Council the functions of its working body are executed by the staff of the Statcommittee. Council holds meetings when necessary but at least twice a year. Since February 1992 when the CIS Statcommittee was established 20 meetings of the Council were organized, where over 100 issues were discussed.
Council discusses the most important problems of the interstate statistical cooperation.
All methodological problems are obligatory discussed at the sessions of Scientific council of the CIS Statcommittee before they will be discussed by the Council of the Heads of Statistical Services. Among them there are the problems of macroeconomic and financial statistics, industrial and socio-demographic statistics, statistics of domestic and external trade, international comparisons of the Commonwealth countries, harmonization of economic classifications and statistical forms and so forth. Use of commonly accepted statistical methodology makes a base for reconstruction of all system of statistics applicable to socio-economic transformations which took place the Commonwealth countries. Beginning from 1995 the Council discussed systematically the progress of work of national statistical bodies on preparation and conducting regular population censuses in the CIS countries using the unified programme and methodological base in accordance with UN recommendations and international obligations. The Council approved Minimum set of indicators in national census questionnaires, Model law on population census, Model glossaries of nationalities and occupations that will allow to receive comparable data for interstate exchange.