There are a number of reasons. I think the economy has played a role. I've seen in some articles in American newspapers that they've noticed a drop in registrations due to the economy as well.
In addition, among corporations and organizations, we also noted in last year's annual report that the number of firms actually increased, but the number of lobbyists dropped. I think what was going on was that firms were restructuring.
While there's not a cost of registering if they file online, what some companies have said to me is there is a cost of compliance. In order to make sure they are complying with the act, they've either hired somebody specifically to keep track of meetings and to file the registrations or if there need to be changes made to the monthly report they have somebody taking care of that. Pierre can comment further, but where there maybe used to be six individuals in a firm, we're noticing that this number has almost dropped by two people per corporation on average. And in-house organizations are doing the same thing, reducing the number of people.
The other thing we've seen with the in-house organization is that they're pretty small in this grand scheme of things anyway. So what I think some of the previously registered ones have done is not to register. Previously, if they were hitting 15% of their time, they thought they'd register, but our anecdotal evidence is now showing that with the additional requirement of the monthly communications, they are looking at their activities and if they're not hitting a specific amount of time, they seem to be choosing not to register.
It's one of the things we take seriously and are keeping track of. Pierre's shop is keeping track of what's happening with the stats, and he and I actually meet on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to go through the statistics. At some point we're going to try to look through them, and if our analysis picks up a trend among some of these firms, we may actually go back out and—