Census May Have Hired Violent Criminals to Canvass Your Home
A Senate Subcommittee hearing today revealed that nearly 36,000 Census Bureau employees were hired despite the fact that the fingerprint component of their criminal record checks was botched. Despite additional name checks recommended by the FBI, the GAO said that it was possible that more than 200 employees hired by the Census Bureau had criminal records, and were in contact with the public while canvassing for the ongoing 2010 census.
Robert Goldenkoff, the Government Accountability Office’s Director for Strategic Issues, said that the criminal record checks were bungled because of poor staff training. Bureau staff with less than 2 hours of training in fingerprinting ruined about a fifth of the 162,000 necessary criminal record checks.
If the properly processed criminal record checks are any indication, the Bureau may have let a large number of violent criminals slip through the cracks. Of the prints that were properly checked, about one percent, or 1,800 workers, had criminal records that name checks failed to identify.
Of these 1,800 workers with criminal records, about 750 had their employment terminated or further reviewed due to criminal records that included crimes like rape, manslaughter and child abuse. Projecting these numbers to the employees with spoilt prints, the GAO came up with the figure of 200 census workers that may have had serious criminal records.
There are also issues of cost – each fingerprint test costs $17.25, whether or not the fingerprints were properly taken. This means that over $615,000 was wasted by the Census Bureau due to poor fingerprinting practices. Because of the confusion over fingerprinting, the agency spent $6 million more than they originally budgeted.
Further tarnishing the Census Bureau’s image is the hearing’s disclosure of address canvassing overruns of over 25%. Address canvassing is when census staff verify addresses on-site, so as to keep the Bureau’s address list accurate. While the Bureau had projected that its costs for address canvassing would be around $356 million, it spent $88 million more than it originally estimated.
Of even greater concern is the fact that the GAO still does not have an accurate estimate about how much the 2010 Census will cost. In 2004, the GAO had estimated that the cost of the 2010 census could be over $11 billion. The most recent Census Bureau estimate is now $14.7 billion, a number that the GAO has said it is unable to verify “because key details and assumptions are unavailable.” In the report submitted for today’s hearing, the GAO criticized the Census Bureau for a “long-standing weakness in [its] ability to develop credible and accurate estimates for the 2010 census.”
Indeed, the GAO points out that the Census’ previous cost estimates lacked significant amounts of documentation on data sources and assumptions, and did not include all costs.
The organization was already reported to have been behind schedule for the 2010 Census, and now faces an even bigger challenge. The exposure of these glaring problems at the Census Bureau will mar the organization’s reputation, and in particular could drive down the census participation rate. If these problems aren't addressed, people may be wary of opening their doors to census staff who have not been properly vetted for criminal records.
These unexpected revelations may wreck steadily improving relations between the Republican Party and Dr. Robert Groves, the Democratically-appointed Census Bureau Director. In an interview with NewMajority yesterday, Brock McCleary, a spokesman for Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), the ranking member on the House subcommittee for the Census said: “Groves is winning friends on the Hill, on both sides of the aisle... I can’t sit and identify anything that at this moment is a grave threat.”
Republicans will no doubt now be able to identify more than a few grave threats facing the census bureau.