Technological problems at the Census Bureau with software for managing personnel assigned to conduct in-person interviews of households that didn't mail in their 2010 form are indicative of deeper problems at the bureau, says the Government Accountability Office.

In a report dated Dec. 14, the GAO says the Bureau must totally rethink its approach toward administering the decennial census. Among the changes required is an improved ability to manage information technology, the GAO says.

The report, which focuses on how the bureau performed in capturing the data of people who failed to return their mail-in questionnaire, mentions only in passing the well-told story of Census's inability to field handheld computers for door-to-door collection. Instead, it details problems with the system the bureau fielded to manage the pen-and-paper operation of enumerating non-responding households.

That system, the Paper-Based Operations Control System, was unequal to the workload placed on it by local census offices. While the system was meant to handle more than 7,000 simultaneous users, bureau officials restricted the number of users who could logon to just three or five per local office, meaning that nationwide there were only about 1,500 to 2,500 users on the system at any one time.

The bureau also frequently took the system offline so they could upgrade the software or "perform other system maintenance activities," the report states.

The limited system availability hampered the bureau's ability to effectively monitor personnel productivity and data quality from the in-person interviews, the report states. As a means of ensuring data accuracy, PBOCS was programmed to select some households already interviewed by one Census worker for another interview by a different worker. But, with PBOCS backed up, the selection was in some cases delayed by months. In areas with large populations of college students, that meant that the reinterviews in affected areas couldn't be conducted since the students had moved. In other cases, incidents of intentionally falsified work weren't caught until the indolent worker had finished his assignment--meaning that the entire area covered by that worker had to be redone.

As the bureau contemplates the 2020 census, it must ensure that it balances the acquisition of advanced technology with the need to commit to particular systems early enough so that its assured that repeats of PBOCS won't occur, the GAO says.

It should also consider using private sector sources of information such as maps, address lists and other geographic information to support the census. Data collection that uses the Internet and administrative records should be a possibility so long as it wouldn't compromise the confidentiality of the Census, the report adds.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-193 (.pdf)

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