text: These figures cover all employed persons, that is, employees, self-employed with employees = 
  employers, self-employed without employees and contributing family member. Literature shows that 
  some**categories of self-employed**have higher accident 
  than employed worker 
  persons.143**ESAW data can hardly be used for a comparison between self-employed and other**
  **groups**, because self-employed are in many EU Member States not part of an obligatory work accident 
  insurance, but can instead take a choice between obligatory insurance, additional private insurance or 
  full private insurance. 144 Moreover, according to the ESAW regulation, the EU Member States can 
  decide whether to report work accident data of self-employed to Eurostat or not.145 
  
  rates 
  
  **Since the start of ESAW the identification**of the**level of underreporting**was of**high importance**. 
  Periodically, Eurostat itself estimates underreporting rates per country, for example, in the ESAW 
  methodology 2001. This is necessary to understand the very different incidence rates in Member States, 
  reporting at the lowest 62 (Romania) and highest 3,425 (France) non-fatal accidents per 100,000 
  employed persons (2019).146 These enormous differences of the occurrence of non-fatal accidents can 
  only be explained by different levels of reporting levels and respectively underreporting. 