By VERNON CLEMENT JONES, Guardian Business Editor, vernon@nasguard.com

Guardian Business has learned that fewer than 50 percent of businesses are now complying with the requests of Department of Statistics officials knocking on their doors with an exhaustive economic census in hand.

According to two of those enumerators, they've been barraged with a flurry of excuses as they attempt to make appointments to sit down with business owners, or their designated representatives. It's their job to guide those proprietors through a comprehensive list of questions touching on staffing levels, revenue, expenses, asset depreciation and gross fixed capital formation. That last one is the total value of any additions or improvements made to a company's fixed assets minus any losses to that infrastructure or inventory during the last year.

In some cases, many of the business people agreeing to submit to the probe seem to be "pulling figures out of a hat" with no apparent reference to their actual balance sheets and human resource files, charge enumerators.

That lack of cooperation may ultimately compromise the survey, which began last month and is focused on collecting 2007 data or the last full fiscal year of an operation.

Those questions go beyond surface and are meant to gauge the fiscal health of Bahamian business, providing a detailed snapshot of each sector's performance, deputy director Leona Wilson told Guardian Business in April. By the way, she's not the one expressing concern this week, rather it's two of the canvassers hired to criss-cross New Providence and interface with respondents who are pointing fingers.

The Chamber of Commerce President, Dionisio D'Aguilar understands and even sympathizes with the challenges they continue to face. But D'Aguilar argues those difficulties could have been avoided.

"The easier you make it for businesses to comply," he said Tuesday, "the higher percentage will comply.

"Statistics should have put all of theses questions on-line and you would have made it much more efficient and easy to fill out."

Still, he readily concedes that a significant number of businesses, many of them drawn from his membership rolls, will do any and everything to keep from sharing that information. He calls that shortsighted.

"There is a fear that what Statistics says is confidential, isn't necessarily confidential," he said. "But I say 'so what'

"This information is in the interest of the public, in the interest of the public good. Comply."

With more than 70 enumerators working their way across the islands of The Bahamas over the next few months, those business owners won't want for the opportunity to meet what is still a legal obligation.