Notice2024-22361
Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Review and Approval; Comment Request; Business Enterprise Research and Development 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
September 30, 2024
Issuing agencies
Commerce DepartmentCensus Bureau
Full Text
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<title>Federal Register, Volume 89 Issue 189 (Monday, September 30, 2024)</title>
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[Federal Register Volume 89, Number 189 (Monday, September 30, 2024)]
[Notices]
[Pages 79511-79512]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [<a href="http://www.gpo.gov">www.gpo.gov</a>]
[FR Doc No: 2024-22361]
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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 Enterprise Research and Development 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 May 29, 2024, during a 60-day comment period. This
notice allows for an additional 30 days for public comments.
Agency: U.S. Census Bureau, Commerce.
Title: Business Enterprise Research and Development Survey.
OMB Control Number: 0607-0912.
Form Number(s): BRD-1.
Type of Request: Regular submission, Request for an Extension,
without Change, of a Currently Approved Collection.
Number of Respondents: 47,500.
Average Hours per Response: 2 hours and 37 minutes.
Burden Hours: 124,450.
Needs and Uses: The Census Bureau is requesting clearance to
continue to conduct the Business Enterprise Research and Development
Survey (BERD) for the 2024-2026 survey years without change. Companies
are the major performers of research and development (R&D) in the
United States, accounting for over 70 percent of total U.S. R&D
expenditures each year. A consistent business R&D information base is
essential to government officials formulating public policy, industry
personnel involved in corporate planning, and members of the academic
community conducting research. To develop policies designed to promote
and enhance science and technology, past trends and the present status
of R&D must be known and analyzed. Without comprehensive business R&D
statistics, it would be impossible to evaluate the health of science
and technology in the United States or to make comparisons between the
technological progress of our country and that of other nations.
BERD is a joint statistical project between the National Center for
Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) within the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and the Census Bureau. The National Science Foundation
Act of 1950 as amended authorizes and directs the National Science
Foundation ``. . . to provide a central clearinghouse for the
collection, interpretation, and analysis of data on scientific and
engineering resources and to provide a source of information for policy
formulation by other agencies of the Federal government'' and the
authority was renewed by Section 505 of the America COMPETES
Reauthorization Act of 2010. This mandate is fulfilled by NCSES. One of
the methods used by NCSES to fulfill this mandate is the BERD (and its
predecessor surveys)--the primary federal source of information on R&D
in the business sector. NCSES together with the Census Bureau, the
collecting and compiling agent, analyze the data and publish the
resulting statistics.
NCSES has published annual R&D statistics collected from the Survey
of Industrial Research and Development (1953-2007), the Business R&D
and Innovation Survey (2008-2016), the Business Research and
Development Survey (2017 and 2018), and the Business Enterprise
Research and Development Survey (2019-2023) for 70
[[Page 79512]]
years. The results of the surveys are used to assess trends in R&D
expenditures by industry sector, investigate productivity determinants,
formulate science and tax policy, and compare individual company
performance with industry averages. This survey is the Nation's primary
source for international comparative statistics on business R&D
spending.
BERD will continue to collect the following types of information:
<bullet> R&D expense based on accepted accounting standards.
<bullet> Worldwide R&D of domestic companies.
<bullet> Business segment detail.
<bullet> R&D related capital expenditures.
<bullet> Detailed data about the R&D workforce.
<bullet> R&D strategy and data on the potential impact of R&D on
the market.
Beginning in 2019, in an effort to reduce burden, BERD began
rotating select content off the survey in alternating years. In 2019,
questions related to intellectual property and technology transfer were
removed from the survey. In 2020, questions related to detail of R&D
performed by others, activities with academia, industries of business
and specific federal agency funding R&D, and areas of application for
R&D were removed and the intellectual property and technology transfer
questions rotated back on. This cycle of rotating content has
continued. In 2021, the Capital Expenditures section was revised to
collect additional information on assets. Proposed at that time was to
collect two consecutive years of data (for 2021 and 2022) and rotate
select asset content off the survey in alternating years. So, in 2023,
BERD would have had a subset of the asset content, and in 2024, all of
the asset content would have been included on the survey. This proposed
content rotation did not occur in 2023. However, the rotation will
commence in 2024. Resulting in a subset of the asset content collected
in 2024 and all of the asset content collected in 2025 and so on,
similar to the other rotating content. Census and NCSES will continue
to explore content that could be collected less frequently than annual
in an effort to continue to reduce respondent burden.
Information from BERD will continue to support NCSES'
responsibility to collect information on Research and Development for
overall support for Federal policy discussions, as required under the
America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010.
Policy officials from many Federal agencies rely on these
statistics for essential information. Businesses and trade
organizations rely on BERD data to benchmark their industry's
performance against others. For example, total U.S. R&D expenditures
statistics are used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) for
incorporating R&D as fixed investment in updates to the National Income
and Product Accounts (NIPAs). Also, NCSES, BEA and the Census Bureau
periodically seek to use BERD data to augment global R&D investment
information that is obtained from BEA's Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
and U.S. Direct Investment Abroad (USDIA) surveys. Further, the Census
Bureau links data collected by BERD with other statistical files. At
the Census Bureau, historical company-level R&D data are linked to a
file that contains information on the outputs and inputs of companies'
manufacturing plants. Researchers can analyze the relationships between
R&D funding and other economic variables by using micro-level data.
Individuals and organizations access the survey statistics via the
internet in annual InfoBriefs published by NCSES that announce the
availability of statistics from each cycle of BERD and detailed
statistical table reports that contain all the statistics NCSES
produces from BERD. Information about the kinds of projects that rely
on statistics from BERD is available from internal records of Census'
Center for Economic Studies. In addition, survey statistics are
regularly cited in trade publications and many researchers use the
survey statistics from these secondary sources without directly
contacting NCSES or the Census Bureau. Some of the users of the survey
statistics and the types of information they request are described
below.
Frequency: Annually.
Respondent's Obligation: Mandatory.
Legal Authority: The survey is conducted under the authority of
Title 13, United States Code, Sections 8(b), 131, and 182; Title 42,
United States Code, Sections 1861-76 (National Science Foundation Act
of 1950, as amended); and Section 505 within the America COMPETES
Reauthorization Act of 2010.
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 0607-0912.
Sheleen Dumas,
Department PRA Clearance Officer, Office of the Under Secretary for
Economic Affairs, Commerce Department.
[FR Doc. 2024-22361 Filed 9-27-24; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 3510-07-P
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