Justification for adding question to local business phone interview

Statement of Why a New Question Needs to be Added in Local Business Interview
The objective of telephone interviews with local businesses is to gain information on
what amount (in dollars) of the intermediate inputs (goods and services) was sold by local
businesses to each vessel class. In addition to obtaining this information, we plan to add
a new, simple question in the telephone interviews with local businesses in the Southwest
data collection project (OMB Control Number 0648-0562). The new question to be
added is the following:
Q3: On purchase invoices that you send to customers, in what city is your billing
address located?
1. Same as store location
2. Other Alaska location
3. Out-of-state location
4. N/A
We plan to add this question for the following reason: the Alaska crab rationalization
program requires the vessel owners and processors to report their economic data
including the information on the location of their expenditures. In some cases, the
reported data on the location of expenditures say that their purchases of goods and
services are made in an out-of-state firm although their actual purchases of the goods and
services were made at a local business within an Alaska community. This occurs if the
local business bills their sales using the address of their parent firm located outside of
Alaska. Therefore, to validate the data on location of expenditures obtained from the
Alaska crab rationalization program, it is necessary to obtain information on the billing
address that the local business uses. The new question will ask the local businesses about
this information. With this information, it will be possible to examine to what extent the
crab rationalization expenditure data are under- or over-estimated for different locations.
The data to be obtained via this question will be aggregated so that we will use only the
information on the proportions of local businesses which bill their sales using their own
businesses, other parent firms in other Alaska areas, and firms outside of Alaska. Billing
address information on individual local businesses will not be revealed or used. In
addition, the information thus obtained can be used to validate similar data that will be
obtained from other future, potential rationalization programs for the two regions.
Assuming that it will take only 30 seconds (or less) to ask this additional question, the
additional total burden will be 56 minutes (1 hour): 112 respondents multiplied by 30
seconds.