Searching for the silver bullet: Are EIA's current tools adequate for designing and testing EIA business surveys?

This paper addresses the efforts of the U.S. Energy Information Administration to design, test and implement new and substantially redesigned surveys. The need to change EIA's surveys has become increasingly important, as U.S. energy industries have moved from highly regulated to deregulated business. This has substantially affected both their ability and willingness to report data. The paper focuses on how EIA has deployed current tools for designing and testing surveys and the reasons that these methods have not always yielded the desired results. It suggests some new tools and methods that we would like to try to improve the quality of our data.