A senior U.S. Census Bureau official says budgetary issues were the primary reason that the federal agency opted not to include non-employers — which are businesses without paid employees — in the 2012 American Samoa Economic Census.

According to the Census Bureau, the economic statistics for 2012 are not comparable to 2007 because only firms with paid employees are included in the 2012 Economic Census, whereas in 2007 companies without paid employees were also included.

No reason was given for this change by the Census Bureau when the data was first released Tuesday from Washington D.C., although there were some local concerns for the fact that there are many small Mom & Pop stores in the territory out in the villages — and they do not have ‘paid employees’.

On Wednesday, when Lee R. Wentela, branch chief of the Census Bureau’s Economic Census Branch, gave the official presentation of the economic census data in a news conference, he provided an explanation. The last two economic censuses — which is held every five years — were in 2002 and 2007.

In those two censuses, Wentela explained, “We collected data for non-employers — those businesses without paid employees. That was done through an enumeration process, where we visited… the actual businesses.”

“It was a relatively costly effort, for a… relatively small gain and coverage of economic activities. [This is] not to say it’s not useful,” he said, and pointed out that the Census Bureau used to cover this same segment of the business community in other island areas, “and then we made a decision some time ago to stop doing so because of the cost.

Including non-employers in the 2002 and 2007 censuses was “to get a baseline measure of what that segment is” but “we really didn’t find major differences [and] in fact, the portion of activity from non-employers was somewhat lesser here then other places,” he said.

While he acknowledged that there is a relatively high numbers of small ‘Mom & Pop’ stores, he said, “their level of activity... relative to the total was not higher than elsewhere. In fact, it was somewhat lower.”

Wentela said, “So we made the decision to stop covering the non employers — for budgetary reasons, primarily,” and also stated that in visiting non-employees, “we sometimes found that they were not really non-employers. They would tell us that they have some paid employees. I suspect that’s the case everywhere we would go, if we went to see the non-employers.”

In the last census, only 1% of sales were from non-employers, he said. (Census statistics for 2007 show the territory’s entire economy generated almost $1.3 billion in sales while 2012 sales were nearly $1.2 million.)

Wentela says the census is very helpful to the business community as well as government and data can also be used by these sectors to set revenue and budget projections based on economic activities.

He also shared that manufacturing — which includes the canneries — is the largest industry in the territory.

Besides the news media, others who attended Wednesday’s news conference were  StarKist Samoa's general manager Brett Butler, Rep. Faimealelei Anthony Allen, chairman of the House Government Operations Committee; and Lewis Wolman, chairman of the local Chamber of Commerce.

Wentela was scheduled to present yesterday to the Chamber a briefing on the economic census data as well as provide the Chamber a question/answer period.