1. Full consolidation of S.1
Item 3c Eurostat Task Force on Annual Financial Accounts Frankfurt, 4 March 2016

2. Consolidation: sector level
Under ESA 2010, consolidation is the elimination of transactions or positions involving reciprocal financial assets / liabilities within a group of institutional units
Applied to (consolidated) financial accounts, consolidation occurs within each institutional sub-sector, and at sector level between sub-sectors.
Therefore, sum of subsectors ≠ sector

3. Consolidation: total economy
ESA 2010 is not explicit on consolidation at level of total economy (S.1)
Eurostat recommends that sectors should be consolidated between themselves, so that
sum of sectors ≠ S.1
(and S.1 consolidated = S.2)
In the non-consolidated tables only, S.1 = S.11+S.12+S.13+S.14+S.15
In the consolidated tables, S.1 = S.2 (strictly speaking, S.1 liabilities = S.2 assets). But not all countries fully consolidate S.1.
As a general rule, accounting entries in the system should be non-consolidated. Anyway, information on counterparts is needed in order to produce the consolidated data.
Consolidated data are useful for particular presentations or analyses, for example, net lending / borrowing by sector.

4. Why ‘full’ S.1 consolidation?
Demonstrates the full internal consistency of the consolidated tables
The dataset coding for consolidation of S.1 series is ‘C’ and not ‘P’ (partial)
Users could still obtain partial consolidated S.1 data (i.e. the sum of consolidated sectors). The reference metadata would explain this.

5. Conclusion
Important for cross-country comparability that countries follow the same method.
Since Eurostat recommended ‘full’ consolidation in the FAWG meeting in December 2010, more countries compile this way. Of the EU Member States, 15 now do so.
TF AFA members are invited to express their views on the recommendation.