Census Count Was Fast; Was It Accurate?

The Census Bureau’s Los Angeles region placed second nationally for timeliness and completeness during the 2000 head count, but its performance may have come at the expense of accuracy, according to a growing chorus of area census employees.

Census officials vehemently deny any compromise in the integrity of the count nationwide or in the region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

“I called [it] the ‘Good Census,’ and I believe that accurately describes what the Census Bureau has achieved,” Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt told Congress on Thursday.

But census documents reviewed by The Times in recent months appear to back some employees’ concerns.

In Santa Monica, for example, dozens of census takers completed in just a few days in June what was expected to take them weeks to accomplish.

As much as 40 percent of their nearly two-month workload was completed from June 2 through June 7--a particularly tense period for the census. Their rate of closing “nonresponse follow-up cases” was as much as five times as high as those of other census takers in the area.

Some workers say that performance is improbable, given that, at such a late date, it was the most difficult households that were being surveyed.

The nonresponse follow-up phase takes place in a period of two to three months after the survey’s mail-in period ends.

One area employee who, like others, feared retribution and spoke on the condition of anonymity, described the Santa Monica experience as a “huge whitewash.” The workers interviewed ranged from census takers to high-ranking supervisors in the Los Angeles region.

“There should have been three weeks’ worth of work,” the employee said. “In little over a week, it was done.”

Steve Jost, a senior spokesman for the Census Bureau, said that overall, 10%--or 6,698 cases--of Santa Monica’s total workload of 66,908 was completed from June 2 through June 5.

Workers and congressional sources said the region keyed all of its cases into the computer by June 10--nearly a month before the national goal of July 7. But Jost said the region finished its nonresponse follow-up phase on June 17.

Other documents The Times obtained indicated that what employees considered too many cases had been closed after census takers reported not finding anyone home during the requisite six trips to each address. In one case examined by The Times, a search of state property records and a drive up Sunset Plaza Drive revealed that the address didn’t exist.

Hearing Echoes Employees’ Concerns

“That makes me very upset,” said another employee who saw at least a half dozen such closed cases. It was hard not to consider such entries fraudulent, the employee added. “It’s something you do once every 10 years and to [rush it] for someone’s private gain, if that’s what the case is, I find that appalling. That’s one of the reasons Congress should look into it.”

Such concerns were echoed at a House subcommittee hearing on the census Thursday, at which the chairman questioned the accuracy of the nationwide census count, citing the Los Angeles region as one area for concern.

Subcommittee Chairman Dan Miller (R-Fla.) said he wondered whether the agency’s rush to wrap up the count and the practice of giving cash incentives to certain employees would compromise the count, something bureau officials and Democrats on the panel denied.

“No awards were given to any employees for completing early work,” Jost said in a later interview. He added that any urgency to finish as soon as possible is intended to avoid having respondents forget who was living in their households on April 1, the legal date for the census count of all residents. “There’s no evidence of any systematic issues or problems,” Jost added.

Democrats on the subcommittee, led by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) praised Prewitt, saying he successfully led the census effort to a timely conclusion.

But census employees described the pressure to finish up the nonresponse follow-up phase as “unreal.”

Offices that were lagging behind the 95 percent completion rate the first week in June were told to “get the work in” and not question irregularities, employees said. That, in turn, pressured workers into labeling as nonresponsive such households as the nonexistent address off Sunset Plaza Drive.

Similar pressures to wrap up the nonresponse follow-up were indicated in the bureau’s evaluation of census dress rehearsals two years ago. In Sacramento, for example, one in five of the census takers completed forms relying on data from neighbors, businesses or other people outside the households being counted.

Los Angeles area workers were not alone in their concerns. The manager of the downtown Milwaukee office resigned in May, saying demands of the bureau, concerning overtime and staffing, compromised her ethics.

And in Florida, Department of Commerce investigators are wrapping up an inquiry into the Hialeah office, according to congressional sources. That investigation was launched after anonymous employees there complained to lawmakers that they were being told to cheat and falsify information “in order to make the numbers.”

“All of these regions are in a fierce competition with each other to finish ahead of schedule,” said Chip Walker, deputy staff director for the House subcommittee on the census. “We believe this fierce competition . . . is creating a lack of quality in final tabulations.”

But census experts came to the bureau’s defense.

“The longer it takes, the worse the results get, because people move and other things happen,” said Margo J. Anderson, a University of Wisconsin historian who has written extensively about the census. “What the congressman [Miller] is suggesting is that if they stayed in the field longer, they would get better data. That’s exactly the opposite of what the 1990 census showed. The longer they stayed in the field, the worse the results got.”

A former top census official agreed and described the allegations of sloppy or fraudulent work as “no surprise.”

“You always have some areas where it’s going better than others,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s not humanly possible to expect to do this labor-intensive process equally everywhere.”

That’s why the bureau still advocates “sampling,” or estimating responses for households that refuse to participate or are otherwise missed in the count.

Incentive Issue Raised Repeatedly

Debate at the hearing Thursday centered on that controversial method--a technique favored by Democrats and opposed by the GOP--but Miller repeatedly raised the issue of financial and other incentives promised to local census takers who finished their work quickly.

“I am concerned about the proper balance between timeliness and quality,” he told Prewitt.

Prewitt responded first by denying that workers were offered monetary rewards. “There is no bonus system connected to completing work,” Prewitt said. A few minutes later he conceded that what his office likes to call “incentive programs for finishing work on time” might legitimately be called bonuses.

In a later interview, Jost said the incentives, which are not available to temporary employees like census takers, were not offered to anyone for early completion of the nonresponse follow-up. Los Angeles Regional Director John Reeder did not receive any bonus in connection with this census, Jost added.

Reeder could not be reached for comment.

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This story has been edited to reflect the following correction to the original published text: the percentage of Santa Monica’s total workload of 66,908 cases that was completed from June 2 through June 5 was 10%, not 11.5%.

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