Notice2023-15812
Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Review and Approval; Comment Request; Business Trends and Outlook Survey
Primary source
Metadata and text below are from the Federal Register, a public-domain U.S. government work. Always verify the official published version before relying on it for any legal matter.
Published
July 26, 2023
Issuing agencies
Commerce DepartmentCensus Bureau
Full Text
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<title>Federal Register, Volume 88 Issue 142 (Wednesday, July 26, 2023)</title>
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[Federal Register Volume 88, Number 142 (Wednesday, July 26, 2023)]
[Notices]
[Pages 48188-48190]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [<a href="http://www.gpo.gov">www.gpo.gov</a>]
[FR Doc No: 2023-15812]
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DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
Census Bureau
Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Review and Approval; Comment
Request; Business Trends and Outlook Survey
The Department of Commerce will submit the following information
collection request to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for
review and clearance in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of
1995, on or after the date of publication of this notice. We invite the
general public and other Federal agencies to comment on proposed, and
continuing information collections, which helps us assess the impact of
our information collection requirements and minimize the public's
reporting burden. Public comments were previously requested via the
Federal Register on November 9, 2021 during a 60-day comment period.
This notice allows for an additional 30 days for public comments.
Agency: U.S. Census Bureau, Department of Commerce.
Title: Business Trends and Outlook Survey.
OMB Control Number: 0607-1022.
Form Number(s): This online survey has no form number.
Type of Request: Regular submission, Request for a Revision of a
Currently Approved Collection.
Number of Respondents: 858,000 annually.
Average Hours per Response: 8 minutes.
Burden Hours: 111,540.
Needs and Uses: The mission of the U.S. Census Bureau (Census
Bureau) is to serve as the leading source of quality data about the
nation's people and economy; in order to fulfill this mission, it is
necessary to innovate to produce more detailed, more frequent, and more
timely data products. The Coronavirus pandemic was an impetus for the
creation of new data products by the Census Bureau to measure the
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pandemic's impact on the economy: the Small Business Pulse Survey
(SBPS) and the weekly Business Formation Statistics. Policymakers and
other federal agency officials, media outlets, and academia commended
the Census Bureau's rapid response to their data needs during the
largest economic crisis in recent American history. The Census Bureau
capitalized on the successes that underlaid the high frequency data
collection and near real time data dissemination engineered for the
SBPS by creating the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS).
BTOS uses ongoing data collection to produce high frequency,
timely, and granular information about current economic conditions and
trends. BTOS is the only biweekly business tendency survey produced by
the federal statistical system, providing unique and detailed data
during times of economic or other emergencies. The BTOS initial target
population is all nonfarm, single-location employer businesses with
receipts of $1,000 or more in the United States, the District of
Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The current sample consists of approximately
1.2 million single-unit businesses split into six panels. Data
collection occurs every two weeks, and businesses in each panel are
asked to report once every 12 weeks for one year. Current data from
BTOS are representative of all single location employer businesses
(excluding farms) in the U.S. economy and are published every two
weeks. The data are available at the national and state levels, in
addition to the 25 most-populous Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs).
North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) sector,
subsector, and state by sector are also published, as are employment
size class, and sector by employment size class data, according to the
same timeline.
Data from BTOS are currently used to provide timely data to
understand the economic conditions being experienced by single unit
businesses; BTOS provides near real time data on key items such as
revenue, paid employees, hours worked as well as inventories which is
being added in for the second collection cycle. BTOS also provides high
level information on the changing share of businesses facing
difficulties stemming from supply chain issues, interest rate changes,
or weather events. Previously, there had been few data sources
available to policymakers, media outlets, and academia that delivered
near real-time insights into economic trends and outlooks. BTOS data
has been used by the Small Business Administration to evaluate the
impact of regulatory changes. Use of the BTOS data (or additional
requirements) is being determined by the Economic Development Agency
(EDA) to understand the impact of natural disasters on U.S. businesses
for the EDA to then guide the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) and/or policymakers in assisting in economic recovery support
missions.
In the approved OMB package for BTOS, the Census Bureau proposed an
incremental path to reach the full scope of BTOS. This request is the
first scope expansion to propose adding multi-unit businesses (those
with more than one location or establishment) to BTOS. BTOS is
currently limited in scope to include only single-unit businesses.
Despite comprising a relatively small share of the total number of
businesses, multi-unit (MU) businesses are responsible for most of the
employment, payroll, and revenue/sales in the United States and
contribute disproportionately to economic activity. In addition, MU
businesses are on average larger than single-unit businesses. Adding
these businesses would help ensure that BTOS results are representative
of the full economy. The Census Bureau still proposes an incremental
path to the final scope of BTOS in order to learn at each implemented
stage and to allow for modifications based on lessons learned or
internal/external stakeholder feedback in prior iterations.
For the first year of BTOS, the content remained unchanged at 26
questions. After two rounds of cognitive testing and guidance from data
users, the Census Bureau will move to a set of core questions and
supplemental content, when needed. In addition to adding multi-unit
businesses, the Census Bureau also proposes to change the content for
the second year of BTOS collection. The majority of the content will be
referred to as the core content and comprises most questions included
on the BTOS instrument during the first year of collection. Core
content includes measures of economic activity that are broadly
applicable across non-farm sectors and are important across the
business cycle and during economic or other emergencies. Core content
is also complementary to key items found on other Economic surveys,
such as revenues, employees, hours, and inventories. Core items may
also include concepts that may become core topics. The core content
remains an at approximately six minutes of burden. A skip pattern will
be added for the new core concept of inventories to avoid additional
burden if a business does not carry inventories.
Supplemental content will be included on the instrument as needed
and with a regular periodicity. It will be designed to provide urgently
needed data on an emerging or current issue. The supplement will
include a set of questions that perform a deeper dive into a focused
topic that requires timely data. The Census Bureau estimates the
supplemental questions will impose an additional 2 minutes of burden.
Consideration for core and supplemental concepts will be based on
data consistency, how the questions performed on the current BTOS, the
results of cognitive testing, stakeholder feedback, and the ability to
collect complementary items on monthly, quarterly, annual, or census
programs to provide context and benchmarking. Thus, the Census Bureau
is requesting three years of approval from OMB to expand the scope of
BTOS to include multi-unit businesses and adjust the core and include
supplemental content.
The Census Bureau will submit a request to OMB including 30 days of
public comment announced in the Federal Register to receive approval to
make any substantive revisions to the content or methods of the
proposed survey, including incremental scope changes. It is likely new
supplemental content will be chosen for each year and an updated
instrument will be submitted to OMB for review along with a 30-day
Federal Register Notice.
The BTOS is a survey with bi-weekly data collection and
publication; estimates produced from the BTOS are released as
experimental data products. The SBPS demonstrated the ability of the
Census Bureau to collect and publish high frequency, timely data during
a national economic emergency. The BTOS capitalizes on this success and
provides regularly occurring high frequency data products and measures
of quality based on national and subnational representative samples
using transparent methodology. The BTOS produces data continuously, in
part as a response to feedback on the SBPS that longer time series
would have been useful to contextualize the pandemic impact. Continuous
data allows for the measurement of economic trends during all phases of
the business cycle as well as during times of economic and other
emergencies. The BTOS uniquely provides the ability to produce these
data and associated measures of quality.
The Census Bureau proposes to add multi-unit businesses to the
target population of the BTOS beginning in the second year of data
collection starting on September 11, 2023. Adding these businesses
would help ensure that BTOS results are representative of the full
economy. BTOS will continue to
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publish data using standard business size class categories and will
research the expansion of additional size classes for publication, thus
continuing to be responsive to stakeholders whose missions include
supporting small business research, analysis and advocacy and
reflecting numerous requests from data users to monitor economic trends
impacting small businesses. As with other Census Bureau data products,
detailed methodology and measures of quality will be published for BTOS
data products. BTOS products will be based on representative samples
drawn from the full universe of businesses, making them unique and the
results reliable when compared to other high frequency business survey
data such as those produced in the private sector.
Core content on the BTOS is used to create high frequency economic
measures including inputs (for example, employment and hours), outcomes
(for example, output prices) and conditions faced by businesses (for
example, demand). Survey responses are used to create national level as
well as industry and geographically detailed diffusions indexes which
are easily interpretable as measures of change over time for these core
measures. No other federal statistical data products exist which
provide high frequency measures such as those produced by BTOS.
Frequency: Bi-weekly.
Respondent's Obligation: Voluntary.
Legal Authority: Title 13 U.S.C., sections 131 and 182.
This information collection request may be viewed at
<a href="http://www.reginfo.gov">www.reginfo.gov</a>. Follow the instructions to view the Department of
Commerce collections currently under review by OMB.
Written comments and recommendations for the proposed information
collection should be submitted within 30 days of the publication of
this notice on the following website <a href="http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAMain">www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAMain</a>.
Find this particular information collection by selecting ``Currently
under 30-day Review--Open for Public Comments'' or by using the search
function and entering either the title of the collection or the OMB
Control Number 0607-1022.
Sheleen Dumas,
Department PRA Clearance Officer, Office of the Under Secretary for
Economic Affairs, Commerce Department.
[FR Doc. 2023-15812 Filed 7-25-23; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 3510-07-P
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</html>Indexed from Federal Register on July 26, 2023.
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