Justification for Change to the Labor Docket

Justification for Change to the Labor Docket

Change Request for testing the frequency of collecting data for the Quarterly Agricultural Labor Survey, OMB No. 0535-0109

NASS is submitting this non-substantive change request for increasing the respondent burden, to allow for testing of a new method of data collection for the Agricultural Labor Survey. NASS will collect all 4 quarters of labor and wage data from the October 2011 respondents. NASS will calculate the annual wage rate (AWR) in two ways. First, NASS will calculate the AWR using the data for January 2011, April 2011(modeled), July 2011 and October 2011 and then calculate AWR using the quarterly data collected in October. Comparison tables of the current method to the proposed collection method will be used to validate the methodology of collecting these data annually or biannually. This research project will initially increase respondent burden for the month of October but NASS will use the data collected to evaluate collecting the data less frequently in the future, annually or biannually. By collecting annually or biannually, instead of quarterly, NASS will reduce respondent burden significantly and save the taxpayers approximately $10 million dollars over 10 years.

The estimated sample size for October will be approximately 10,000 respondents. The projected increase in respondent burden will be approximately 4,000 hours.