Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Review and Approval; Comment Request; Generic Clearance for Census Bureau Field Tests and Evaluations

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 7/26/2022 during a 60-day comment period. This notice allows for an additional 30 days for public comments.

Agency: U.S. Census Bureau.

Title: Burden Increase for the Generic Clearance for Census Bureau Field Tests and Evaluations.

OMB Control Number: 0607-0971.

Form Number(s): Not yet determined.

Type of Request: Request for a burden increase.

Number of Respondents: 113,791 per year.

Average Hours per Response: 26.58 minutes.

Burden Hours: 50,424.33 hours annually.

Needs and Uses: The U.S. Census Bureau is committed to conducting research to identify possible cost and burden reductions in future census and survey, while maintaining high quality results. The Census Bureau requests an increase of 60,500 hours to the existing burden estimates for this Generic Clearance. The Census Bureau is making no other changes to this Clearance. This increase will bring the total burden hours for this Clearance to 211,773 hours over the three-year period. Studies to research and evaluate how to improve data collection activities for data collection programs at the Census Bureau have outpaced the original burden estimates. Larger sample sizes will allow us to continue to explore how the Census Bureau can improve efficiency, data quality, and response rates and reduce respondent burden in future census and survey operations, evaluations and experiments. This research program is for respondent communication, questionnaire and procedure development, and evaluation purposes. We will use data tabulations to evaluate the results of testing.

Affected Public: Individuals or households, businesses or other for profit, farms.

Frequency: Once.

Respondent's Obligation: Voluntary or Mandatory, depending on cited authority.

Legal Authority: Data collection for this project is authorized under the authorizing legislation for the questionnaire being tested. This may be 13 U.S.C. 131, 141, 161, 181, 182, 193, and 301 for Census Bureau sponsored surveys, and title 13 and 15 for surveys sponsored by other Federal agencies. We do not now know what other titles will be referenced, since we do not know what survey questionnaires will be pretested during the course of the clearance.

Written comments and recommendations for the proposed change 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 0607-0971.