The following is from an article written by Mike Schneider and published by PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service):
Some census takers who falsified information during the 2020 count didn’t have their work redone fully, weren’t fired in a timely manner and in some cases even received bonuses, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s watchdog group.
The findings released Friday by the Office of Inspector General raise concerns about possible damage to the quality of the once-a-decade head count that determines political power and federal funding,
Off-campus students at colleges and universities were likely undercounted since the census started around the same time students were sent home to stop the spread of COVID-19 in March 2020, the review found.
During the 2020 census, The Associated Press documented cases of census takers who were pressured by their supervisors to enter false information into a computer system about homes they had not visited so they could close cases during the waning days of the census.
Supervisors were able to track their census takers’ work in real time through mobile devices that the census takers used to record information about households’ numbers, demographic characteristics and members’ relationships to one another. As a result, supervisors would get alerts when actions raised red flags about accuracy, such as a census taker recording data on a home while far away from the address or a census taker conducting an interview in just a few minutes. As a quality control check, others census takers were sent back to homes to re-interview residents.
The Inspector General’s probe concluded that some alerts weren’t being properly resolved, some re-interviews weren’t properly conducted and that the work of some census takers whose work had been flagged for falsifying data had not been reworked to fix its accuracy. In fact, some census takers whose work was flagged for falsifications were given more cases, weren’t fired and were reassigned to other operations, the report said.
Of the 1,400 census takers who were designated “hard fails” because questions about the accuracy of their work, only 300 were fired for misconduct or unsatisfactory performance. Of the 1,400 “hard fail” census takers, 1,300 of them received bonuses ranging from $50 to $1,600 each, the report said.
You can read still more about this story at: https://to.pbs.org/3Lwnqtg.