Details
- The NES data measure activity of sole proprietorships and other businesses with no employees at various geographic scales and classified in nearly 300 industries.
- The NES data originate from statistical information obtained through business income tax records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
- Most nonemployers are self-employed individuals operating very small unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owners’ principal sources of income. These firms are excluded from most other business statistics (the primary exception being the Survey of Business Owners).
- A nonemployer firm is defined as one that has no paid employees, has annual business receipts of $1,000 or more ($1 or more in the construction industries).
- Receipts include gross receipts, sales, commissions, and income from trades and businesses, as reported on annual business income tax returns.
Notes and Limitations: In accordance with U.S. Code, Title 13, Section 9, no data are published that would disclose the operations of an individual business. Before 2005, the Census Bureau used the complementary cell suppression method to avoid disclosure of confidential data. Since 2005, the noise infusion data protection method has been applied to prevent disclosure of cell values for receipts. Noise infusion is a method of preventing disclosure in which values for each firm are perturbed before the creation of the table by applying a random noise multiplier to the magnitude data (in this case, receipts) independently for each business. Disclosure protection is accomplished by producing a relatively small change in the vast majority of cell values.