[Federal Register Volume 90, Number 60 (Monday, March 31, 2025)]
[Notices]
[Pages 14229-14231]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2025-05461]
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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 December 18, 2024, 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: 795,000.
Average Hours per Response: 10 minutes.
Burden Hours: 132,500.
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; 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 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
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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 target
population is all nonfarm 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 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 BTOS data BTOS are representative of all 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 is currently used to provide timely data to
understand the economic conditions being experienced by businesses;
BTOS provides near real time data on key items such as revenue, paid
employees, interest rates, and prices. A new sample collection is
conducted each year.
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. The use of the BTOS data
(or additional requirements) is still being determined by the Economic
Development Agency (EDA) to understand the impact of natural disasters
on U.S. businesses. The EDA will 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. The first scope
expansion proposed adding multi-unit businesses (those with more than
one location or establishment) to BTOS. BTOS was 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 helped ensure BTOS
results are representative of the full economy. The Census Bureau still
proposes an incremental path to the final scope of BTOS 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. For the second year, the Census Bureau moved to a set of
core questions and supplemental content. 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, such as the artificial intelligence questions that started
in the second year.
Supplemental content is added to the BTOS instrument as needed and
on a periodic basis. It will be designed to provide urgently needed
data on an emerging or current issue. The supplement will include a set
of questions that performs a deeper dive into a focused topic that
requires timely data. On average, the Census Bureau estimates the
supplemental questions will impose an additional 10 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.
For future changes, 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 that 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.
This submission seeks OMB approval for several requests. First, the
Census Bureau is requesting a three-year extension to continue the BTOS
data collection operations. In addition, the BTOS survey instrument has
been shortened to focus on a concise set of core questions, reducing
the core instrument from 26 to 16 questions. After a few years of data
collection, the Census Bureau recognizes that certain concepts are more
useful than others. Through analysis, the agency identified and
retained the most essential concepts. Going forward, the survey will
remain adaptable to both the evolving economy and the needs of policy
makers. Lastly, the Bureau requests approval to repeat the artificial
intelligence (AI) supplement with content changes, once the cognitive
testing OMB package is no longer on hold, and cognitive testing is
completed. We are submitting with this request the proposed but
untested AI supplemental questions. Once cognitive testing is complete,
we will submit the final set of AI questions as a non-substantive
change.
Based on cognitive testing results, the burden estimate for the
core questions is no more than 10 minutes. The sample year 2 AI
supplement added an additional 10 minutes of burden. The new AI
supplement burden will be determined once cognitive testing is
completed.
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
[[Page 14231]]
entering either the title of the collection or the OMB Control Number
0607-1022.
Sheleen Dumas,
Departmental PRA Compliance Officer, Office of the Under Secretary for
Economic Affairs, Commerce Department.
[FR Doc. 2025-05461 Filed 3-28-25; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 3510-07-P