Negative occurrences include returned cheques, legal suits, collections, judgements, or deferred trades. Records of negative occurrences are scrubbed from the dataset 5 years after they have been addressed. The data demonstrates that new negative occurrences have not matched the pace of the natural drop/decline of purged negative occurrences. To allow for a valid time-series comparison, only businesses that met the following criteria were included in the dataset: (a) were in the dataset for all quarters (i.e. not added as an observation in later quarters) and (b) not bankrupt in Q1 2019. Businesses that did not meet these conditions were excluded.