SURVEY OF BUSINESS OWNERS

The Survey of Business Owners (SBO) provides the only comprehensive, regularly collected source of information on selected economic and demographic characteristics for businesses and business owners by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status. Title 13 of the United States Code authorizes this survey and provides for mandatory responses.

COVERAGE

Included are all nonfarm businesses filing Internal Revenue Service tax forms as individual proprietorships, partnerships, or any type of corporation, and with receipts of $1,000 or more. The SBO covers both firms with paid employees and firms with no paid employees. The SBO is conducted on a company or firm basis rather than an establishment basis. A company or firm is a business consisting of one or more domestic establishments that the reporting firm specified under its ownership or control.

The data are compiled by combining data collected on businesses and business owners in the SBO with data collected on the main economic census and administrative records.

Business ownership is defined as having 51 percent or more of the stock or equity in the business and is categorized by:

Firms equally male-/female-owned, equally minority-/nonminority-owned, and equally veteran-/nonveteran-owned are counted and tabulated as separate categories.

Businesses can be tabulated in more than one racial group. This can result because:

The detail may not add to the total or subgroup total because a Hispanic firm may be of any race, and because a firm can be tabulated in more than one racial group.

The sum of the subgroup detail for Hispanics, Asians, and Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders may not add to the total if no one subgroup owns a majority of the firm, but a combination of these subgroups owns a majority. In this case, the firm is included in the Hispanic, Asian, or Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander estimate, but is not included in any of the subgroup estimates.

CONTENT

Estimates include the number of employer and nonemployer firms, sales and receipts, annual payroll, and employment. Data aggregates are presented by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status for the United States by 2007 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), kind of business, states, metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, counties, places, and employment and receipts size.

FREQUENCY

Data have been collected every 5 years since 1972, for years ending in “2” and “7” as part of the economic census. The program began as a special project for minority-owned businesses in 1969 and was incorporated into the economic census in 1972 along with the Survey of Women-Owned Businesses.

METHODS

To design the SBO sample, the Census Bureau uses the following sources of information to estimate the probability that a business is minority- or women-owned:

These probabilities are then used to place each firm in the SBO universe in one of nine frames for sampling:

The SBO universe is stratified by state, industry, frame, and whether the company has paid employees. The Census Bureau selects large companies, including those operating in more than one state, with certainty. These companies are selected based on volume of sales, payroll, or number of paid employees. All certainty cases are sure to be selected and represent only themselves (i.e., have a selection probability of one and a sampling weight of one). The certainty cutoffs vary by sampling stratum, and each stratum is sampled at varying rates, depending on the number of firms in a particular industry in a particular state. The remaining universe is subjected to stratified systematic random sampling.

PRODUCTS

The SBO data sets include all businesses (minority-, nonminority-, equally minority-/nonminority-owned; female-, male-, equally male-/female-owned; veteran-, nonveteran-, equally veteran-/nonveteran-owned; and publicly held companies and other businesses whose ownership cannot be classified by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status) and are presented by industry classifications and/or geographic area (states, metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, counties, and corporate municipalities (places) including cities, towns, townships, villages, and boroughs) and size of firm (employment and receipts).

The SBO data sets also include the Characteristics of Businesses (CB) and the Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO), which present additional demographic and economic information about business owners and their business activities.

DATA

The SBO data are available on the Census Bureau's Web site at www.census.gov/econ/sbo. The American FactFinder (AFF) system, the Census Bureau’s online, self-service data access tool, allows selective retrieval and downloading of the SBO data and is available at www.factfinder.census.gov.

Special tabulations of SBO data may be obtained, depending on availability of time and personnel, in electronic or tabular form. The data will be summaries subject to the same rules prohibiting disclosure of confidential information (including name, address, kind of business, or other data for individual business establishments or companies) that govern the regular publications.

Special tabulations are prepared on a cost basis. A request for a cost estimate, as well as exact specifications on the type and format of the data to be provided, should be directed to the Chief of the Economic Census Branch, Company Statistics Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC 20233-6400. To discuss a special tabulation before submitting specifications, call 301-763-3316 or e-mail csd.sbo@census.gov.

USES

Government program officials, industry organization leaders, economic and social analysts, and business entrepreneurs routinely use the SBO statistics. Examples of data use include those by:

SPECIAL FEATURES

The SBO provides the only source of detailed and comprehensive data on the status, nature, and scope of women-, minority-, and veteran-owned businesses.