Source: Through 1980, U.S. Federal Trade Commission; thereafter, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Quarterly Financial Report forManufacturing, Mining, and Trade Corporations, Series QFR.

http://www.census.gov/agfs/www/qfr.html

*QUARTERLY FINANCIAL REPORT

PURPOSE

To provide current statistics on the financial performance and conditions of domestic manufacturing, mining, and tradecorporations. The United States Code, Title 13, requires this survey and provides for mandatory responses.

COVERAGE

Corporations that have a plurality of business activity in manufacturing industries and domestic assets over $250,000; andcorporations with a plurality of business activity in the mining, retail, or wholesale trade industries and domestic assets over$50 million. These include almost 172,000 corporations with estimated assets of over $4.6 trillion.

CONTENT

Corporations provide standard income statement and balance sheet data consolidated for all majority-owned domesticenterprises (except banking, insurance, and finance). Information collected includes sales, depreciation, before- and after-taxincome, retained earnings, cash, investments, receivables, inventories, fixed assets, short- and long-term debt, accountspayable, and stockholders' equity.

Large corporations report additional data that include separate reporting of nonoperating income and expenses, earningsfrom foreign and other nonconsolidated entities and investments, extraordinary gains and losses, trade receivables from theU.S. Government, investments in Federal and other securities, commercial paper issued, and treasury stock.

FREQUENCY

Quarterly since 1947, the program was transferred to the Census Bureau from the Federal Trade Commission in 1982. Datacollection begins about 25 days after each quarter and continues for about 9 weeks; data are for 3 months of companyactivities. The survey panel is updated quarterly.

METHODS

Mail-out/mail-back surveys of some 3,700 large manufacturing, mining, and trade corporations using a long form, and ofsome 4,600 selected small- and medium-sized manufacturers using a short form; plus periodic reporting by corporations todetermine and update business classification. The sample frame of firms is updated annually from Federal income taxrecords. Using the tax data, corporations are selected by stratified random sample, with strata by industry and asset size.

To determine initial and continuing eligibility, selected firms are asked to complete a Nature of Business Report form toclassify their enterprises and determine their intercorporate relationships, if any. Data for manufacturing firms with assetsbetween $250,000 and $250 million are estimated from a sample panel. Each quarter, one-eighth of the sample panel isreplaced. Replacement firms report for 8 quarters.

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