I got a most disturbing message on Friday.  The word on the street is that the Federal Reserve Board recently voted to stop producing the Survey of Small Business Finances.  Losing this data is a bad thing.  This survey has been done every five years since 1988 and includes both the sources of financing sought and sources of financing used by small businesses.  The United States has a quite limited approach to collecting and sharing data about business enterprises and this was one of the good ones for two major reasons.  First, it focused upon what many entrepreneurs cite as one of their major problems - financing their businesses.   A second reason for the importance of the data was that it did include owner characteristics, such as gender and race and ethnicity. 

There is no other source of data quite like this available to researchers, practitioners, or policy makers.  A note from the Center for Women's Business Research reminded me that the data is also currently used to produce the Report to Congress on the Availability of Credit to Small Businesses report, required every five years by the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996. 

My understanding is that no public announcement is intended about the cancellation of the data.  The Federal Reserve Board has been providing an important source of data for small businesses.  My friends at the Center for Women's Business Research suggest that we can help with the following steps:  send a letter to the Chair of the Federal Reserve (Dr. Ben S. Bernanke) urging him and the Federal Reserve Board to reconsider its decision; contact the SBA Administrator (Steven Preston at (202) 205-6605 - sorry, his email address isn't included on his SBA contact page) about the potential loss of this resource so that he may weigh in on the report's importance; and send a message to the members of the House and Senate Small Business Committees, asking them to weigh in as to the importance of this data set.    

Small businesses are a critical part of the U.S. economy and we continue to work hard to understand what environment, services, education and training, etc. best support our entrepreneurs.  We can't do that without accurate data to show our past and present state, and therefore guide our future actions.