Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH)

The Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours is Canada's only source of detailed information on the total number of paid employees, payrolls, hours at detailed industrial, provincial and territorial levels.

Detailed information for November 2009

Data release – January 28, 2010

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• Questionnaire(s) and reporting guide(s)
• Description
• Data sources and methodology
• Data accuracy

Description

The Survey of Employment Earnings and Hours is produced from the combination of the Business Payroll Survey results and the payroll deductions administrative data received from Canada Revenue Agency.

The Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours is Canada's only source of detailed information on the total number of paid employees, payrolls, hours at detailed industrial, provincial and territorial levels. In addition to providing the principal input to Labour Income estimates, it also serves as a proxy output measure for about 15% of Real and Gross Domestic Product. The data are also used by the private sector for contract escalation and wage rate determination, by Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to revise the maximum pensionable earnings and retirement savings plan contribution limits.

Subjects

• Employment and unemployment
• Hours of work and work arrangements
• Industries
• Labour
• Wages, salaries and other earnings

Data sources and methodology

• Target population
• Sampling
• Data sources
• Error detection
• Imputation
• Estimation
• Quality evaluation
• Disclosure control
• Revisions and seasonal adjustment

Target population

The target population is composed of all employers in Canada, except those primarily involved in agriculture, fishing and trapping, private household services, religious organisations and military personnel of defence services. SEPH draws its samples from the Business Register (BR) maintained by the Business Register Division of Statistics Canada and from a list of all businesses registered in Canada Revenue Agency's Business Number program with one or more active payroll deduction accounts.

The Business Register is a list of all businesses in Canada and is updated each month using data from various surveys, business profiling and administrative data. The Business number is a unique identifier assigned by Canada Revenue Agency to business participating in one or more of the following programs: Payroll Deduction, Goods and Services Tax, Importer and Exporter Tax and Corporation Tax. The payroll deduction source includes all employers with remittances for employee income taxes, CPP/QPP and Employment Insurance contributions.

Sampling

This survey is a census with a cross-sectional design.

Data are collected for all units of the target population, therefore no sampling is done.

Data sources

Responding to this survey is mandatory. Data are collected directly from survey respondents and extracted from administrative files.

The statistics compiled by SEPH are based on a census of administrative records for all in-scope establishments with employees that can be found on the Business Register. The total payroll employment estimates and the monthly payrolls are derived from the administrative source. Administrative information for total gross monthly payrolls and the total number of employees for the last pay period in the month are obtained from payroll deduction (PD) accounts maintained by Canada Revenue Agency. Public Institutions Division of Statistics Canada provides information for general government services at the provincial and federal levels.

To estimate SEPH variables not available from the administrative source, the results of the Business Payrolls Survey (BPS) conducted monthly are used. The BPS uses a stratified simple random sample of 11,000 establishments out of a population of 900,000 establishments taken from the Business Register. A one-twelfth rotation of the sample is done every month. The Business Payrolls Survey uses a combination of methods for data collection to permit maximum flexibility for the respondent. For mail units, questionnaires are mailed to the payroll office of employers each month. Computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) are used for respondents who express a preference for being surveyed by telephone. Respondents can also report their data electronically. Reporting units, which are non-respondents to the initial mailing, are followed up by telephone by the staff of the regional offices of Statistics Canada.

The estimates derived from the administrative source are then combined with the results of the BPS to produce estimates for the full range of SEPH variables.

View the Questionnaire(s) and reporting guide(s)

Additional documentation

Error detection

For the administrative portion of the survey, there are edits and verification procedures at the data capture stage to ensure that the data is of the best quality possible. In addition, outlier detection is performed at the BN level using the Hidiroglou-Berthelot method for ratios and trends. As well, large changes between months are identified at the enterprise level and are manually edited every month.

The questionnaires from the establishment survey (BPS) portion are carefully edited for completeness, consistency and accuracy both manually and using computer edit procedures. As well, historical edits (weighted and unweighted) are performed at the data collection stage. At the editing stage, employment outliers are identified within each stratum using the quartile method, and their sample weight is set to 1. Regression outliers are identified using Cook's distance and their regression weights are reduced considerably.

Imputation

Administrative portion of the survey: there are four methods of imputation:
1) imputing zero when the Canada Revenue Agency has been advised that there will be no employees in the month;
2) imputing from previous month information with a month-to-month change ratio (trend imputation) where there are indications that the units have activity in the current month;
3) imputing using other available variables (ratio imputation) and,
4) imputing based on current month stratum averages (mean imputation) in some cases where only one value has been reported.

Business Payrolls Survey: missing take-all establishments are imputed using the previous month's reports. In this way, respondent follow up is avoided while making use of as much data provided by the respondent as possible.

Estimation

The total payroll employment estimates and the monthly payrolls are derived from the CRA Payroll Deduction administrative (PD) source.

Because not all SEPH variables are available from the PD remittance forms, a small survey, the Business Payrolls Survey (BPS) is conducted each month to collect the additional information required.

The information obtained from the BPS is used to estimate the weekly component of the gross monthly payrolls, the total number of paid hours (regular hours and overtime) and the allocation of hours, earnings and employment for three categories of employees (salaried, paid by the hour and others such as commission workers.)

Estimation of the additional SEPH variables is done at the model group level, most of which are defined at the national and sub-sector levels except for a few cases where the employment size and the provincial dimensions are used. Regression coefficients calculated at the model group level are applied to the estimates of total employment and payrolls from the administrative sources to estimate the additional variables.

Quality evaluation

Coefficients of variation are analyzed every month to identify the domains having the least accurate estimates. Sampling fractions are adjusted occasionally in order to obtain comparable CVs across domains.

A micro-match is performed every month to compare the BPS data to the administrative source data (employment and payroll). Largest differences are looked at and corrected if necessary.

Disclosure control

Statistics Canada is prohibited by law from releasing any data which would divulge information obtained under the Statistics Act that relates to any identifiable person, business or organization without the prior knowledge or the consent in writing of that person, business or organization. Various confidentiality rules are applied to all data that are released or published to prevent the publication or disclosure of any information deemed confidential. If necessary, data are suppressed to prevent direct or residual disclosure of identifiable data.

Cell suppression via the CONFID software is used to control disclosure of the data.

Revisions and seasonal adjustment

Each month, SEPH releases statistics for the two latest reference months. They represent "preliminary" estimates for the current month and the "revised" estimates for the previous month. On a monthly basis, the preliminary data will be revised in the following month. On an annual basis seasonally adjusted data will be revised back and released with the December revised reference month. From time to time, a historical revision is necessary for changes related to new data sources and revised industry classifications and frame changes.

Data accuracy

For the administrative portion of the survey, response rates based on employment are produced and published every month for Canada, the provinces and the territories by type of payroll deduction accounts for the preliminary and final estimates (see Annex 2 of Statistics Canada catalogue number 72-002-XIB). The total response rate for Canada as a whole usually varies between 80% and 90%.

Every month, coefficients of variation (CV) are published for all variables and every domain (by NAICS industry for Canada, the provinces and the territories). These CVs take into account the sampling variance coming from the BPS as well as the variance due to imputation of the administrative source.