Census: Final Numbers May Be Wrong...

The US government is spending a veritable FORTUNE on running the 2010 census and making sure we respond to it. They're hiring hundreds of thousands of workers, and I have received not only my census form but also TWO reminders to send it in promptly... one before I received the census form, and one after. And with all this money being spent, IT problems may result in inaccurate numbers being recorded.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/63380

Information Technology (IT) problems at the U.S. Census Bureau could cause inaccuracies in this year's constitutionally mandated decennial tabulation of the U.S. population, according to government auditors.

“IT problems place the efficiency and accuracy of Non-Response Follow-Up at risk and final decennial costs remain uncertain,” testified Judith Gordon, the principal assistant inspector general for Audit and Evaluation at the Department of Commerce, which runs the Census Bureau.

Well isn't that special? Pray tell me, are we really going to let the faulty information collected by these incompetents be used for serious purposes? The government has KNOWN about the problems for quite a while.

The Census Bureau is specifically having problems with two IT systems. One is the Paper-Based Operational Control System (PBOC), which is an computer system used to manage the information collected during field operations such as NRFU.

The second is Decennial Applicant Personnel and Payroll System (DAPPS), which is the system used to keep track of, and pay, the more than 600,000 temporary federal workers who help conduct the Census’s NFRU field operations.

Last Thursday, the Government Accountability Office released a report authored by Goldenkoff on the Census Bureau’s IT problems entitle, “Data Collection is Under Way, But Reliability of Key Information Technology Systems Remains a Risk.” The report indicated that the government has known about the problem for some time.

The report said that last February, the GAO had testified that “key IT systems -- most notably an automated system used to manage field data collection known as the Paper-Based Operations Control System (PBOCS) and a personnel and payroll processing system called the Decennial Applicant Personnel and Payroll System (DAPPS) -- were experiencing significant performance issues.” The report documents Goldenkoff's testimony before the House subcommittee.

Lovely, isn't it? And these people are so clueless that they still are "confident" that things will go off without a hitch.

Nevertheless, the Census Bureau's Jackson was optimistic that the bureau would be successful in its count despite the highlighted IT problems.

“We feel that we are more than prepared to do a successful Non-Response Follow-Up at a range of response estimates on time and within the budget we have,” testified Jackson

Lord help us all.