At least once a year updates to ICCS to incorporate rulings will be issued. An issue to be resolved is disseminating updates electronically via the Internet. Fortunately, the use of the production process concept provides an objective way to assign new activities to industries, so changes to interim rulings for new activities are much less likely to occur. Currently each country has its own list of activities. The US had adopted the ICCS software, and work is ongoing to merge the Canadian and US activity lists.
Work is also ongoing with Mexico to develop a common activity data base.
This will improve the consistency of coding across countries. While classification of new activities is the normal maintenance activity, problems encountered in implementing a new classification frequently lead to some fine tuning of the actual structure. Each country has the right to add new 6 digit classes as needed, and Canada has chosen to add 4 new national classes, two in Mining and two in Finance. The ICCS CD ROM 12F0074XCB incorporates rulings made between March 1998 and the end of June 1998 into its activity file. Rulings made since July of 1998 are not yet available to users outside of Statistics Canada.