My Two Census

Census Bureau Director Dr. Robert M. Groves hasn’t been blogging for two weeks. We suspect that this is to avoid all of the problems that have consistently come up surrounding the 2010 Census. You would think that he would use his blog to debunk criticism, but since he hasn’t we will have to assume that there is a significant amount of truth in what has been reported on MyTwoCensus.com. However, yesterday Dr. Groves (or a PR lackey on his behalf) posted again:

We’ve finished the fifth week of the Nonresponse Followup stage of the 2010 Census.

The completion of interviews in this phase is proceeding roughly on schedule. As of Sunday, we completed over 84% of the entire workload.

Some local census offices, those with smaller than expected workloads are entering the final phases of their nonresponse followup workload.

We are now engaged in a variety of quality control procedures. We redo a portion of each enumerator’s work, to gain some assurance that our data quality standards are being maintained. Then we will launch an operation that verifies that cases that the enumerator has recorded as vacant on April 1, were correctly categorized. I’ll say more about our quality assurance procedures in another entry.

H/t to Hope Yen of the AP:

WASHINGTON — The head of the Census Bureau on Wednesday expressed concern about cost overruns in preparations for next year’s high-stakes count, saying he was taking steps to help prevent the expenses from ballooning further.

Appearing before a House panel, Robert Groves said poor planning had resulted in added costs in the address canvassing operation that were $88 million higher than the original estimate of $356 million, an overrun of 25 percent.

Groves said the agency had made some faulty assumptions in how quickly it could get work done. The agency was now re-evaluating budget estimates for the entire census operation, which is projected to cost roughly $15 billion.

“Those budget overruns are intolerable,” he told a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee.

MyTwoCensus obtained the following reports from the Commerce Department Inspector General’s Office last Friday, but we thought we’d give the powers that be a long weekend of relaxation before they start to fret…and we must add, they will be fretting. Throughout this week we will be providing commentary and analyses, but for now here are the three reports that you should take a look at:

Census 2010: Problems Encountered in the Large Block Operation Underscore the Need for Better Contingency Plans (OIG-19171-02)

http://www.oig.doc.gov/oig/reports/2009/Final%20Census%20Large%20Block%20Flash%20Report.pdf

2010 Census: First Quarterly Report to Congress Report (OIG‐19791‐1)

http://www.oig.doc.gov/oig/reports/2009/QTR-1%20First%20Quarterly%20%20Report%20to%20Congress%20080609.pdf

Recommendations from 2010 Census: First Quarterly Report to Congress, August 2009 (OIG-19791-l)

http://www.oig.doc.gov/oig/reports/correspondence/QTR-1%20FINAL%20Report%20Recommendations.pdf