[Federal Register Volume 88, Number 142 (Wednesday, July 26, 2023)]
[Notices]
[Pages 48188-48190]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[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

[[Page 48189]]

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

[[Page 48190]]

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 
www.reginfo.gov. 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 www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAMain. 
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