Rising costs and confusion about requirements have spurred the Census Bureau and its parent Commerce Department to re-evaluate the use of handheld computers for recording addresses during the 2010 Census and to consider returning to paper surveys.
In addition, those problems have led the Government Accountability Office to designate the 2010 Census as a high-risk area.
Handheld computers are the major problem for the decennial Census’ Field Data Collection Automation (FDCA) process. The computers, developed by Harris, performed acceptably in last year’s dress rehearsal for canvassing, but the rising costs concern members of Congress and GAO.
A recent rough life-cycle cost estimate puts the 2010 Census at $11.8 billion, but the final cost could be higher.
“At this point, there’s an awful lot we don’t know,” said Mathew Scire, GAO’s director of Census and regulatory issues, at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing held today. Scire said he had serious concerns about the estimates’ accuracy.
Those costs rose in part because the bureau and Harris could not agree on requirements. The bureau gave the latest version of the requirements to Harris in mid-January. When the company returned a substantial cost estimate for tackling those requirements, it took the agency and the Commerce Department by surprise.
“What we had perceived as serious but manageable problems that were being addressed, we now viewed as critical and urgent matters,” Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said. “There is no question that both the Census Bureau and Harris could have done things differently and better over the past couple of years.”
However, the entrance of newly minted Census Director Steve Murdock — only one and a half months on the job — encouraged the committee because he wasted little time in confronting the problems behind FDCA.
Murdock performed a full evaluation of the Decennial Census and on Feb. 6 launched the 2010 Census FDCA Risk Reduction Task Force. Headed by a former acting director of the agency and staffed by members of the bureau and Commerce and consultants from Mitre, the task force developed four options to pursue. Each would apportion a different slice of responsibility for the three major aspects of FDCA: following up with non-responders, operating the infrastructure of field offices and developing the control system to run those operations.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
