The Annual Business Survey (ABS) is a new joint project between the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. The ABS is a new survey that replaces three existing surveys: the five-year Survey of Business Owners (SBO) for employer businesses, the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE), and the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey for Microbusinesses (BRDI-M), and includes a new innovation content module.
The ABS will provide statistics on minority-owned business estimates and will measure other business and business owner characteristics such as firms, receipts, payroll and employment by demographic characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity and veteran status.