Over the next few weeks, Congress will interview US Census workers about the falsification of unemployment data.
Investigators for the House Oversight Committee, who started the probe of the Census Bureau after a series of reports in this space, have requested that the Commerce Department make at least six census workers from the Philadelphia office available for transcribed interviews.
A seventh person, Julius Buckmon, no longer works at Census, which is a unit of the Commerce Dept.
It is unclear whether Buckmon, who lost his job as a data collector in 2010 after it was discovered he falsified reports, will voluntarily speak with the House committee. The committee has the power to subpoena witnesses. It will be joined in the probe by the Joint Economic Committee.
Census is under contract to collect data for numerous government agencies. The data also are used extensively by economists and private companies for forecasting purposes worldwide.
Buckmon’s falsification involved the Consumer Expenditure Quarterly Survey, the Consumer Expenditure Diary Survey and the Current Population Survey.
The Current Population Survey is used to calculate the nation’s closely watched unemployment rate.
That rate is currently at 7 percent and the December figure will be reported by the Labor Department on Friday.
Labor collects its own data for the so-called Establishment Survey, which calculates the number of jobs created each month. So that part of Friday’s report could not have been affected by Census.
Neither Census nor Commerce investigated the Buckmon’s data fabrication scheme in 2010. The incident only got internal attention at the time because Buckmon filed age and race discrimination complaints against Commerce after he was fired.
Nothing was ever made public about the Buckmon case and Census never reported it to Labor.
The Buckmon incident first became public when it was reported in this space in late November.
Since then, I’ve reported there was a second case of falsification in 2010, when two supervisors in the Brooklyn field office were fired. In that case, the Census Bureau contacted Congress, citing the seriousness of the matter.
Here’s a key question to preoccupy the Oversight Committee: Why was the Philadelphia incident treated so much differently than the one in Brooklyn?
In his complaint against Commerce, Buckmon alleged that higher-ups ordered him to concoct interviews with nonexistent people.
Buckmon had been doing 100 or so more interviews a month than other Census workers, a source told me back in November. For his part, Buckmon said he wasn’t in a position to know if the supervisor had others in the Philadelphia office fake interviews.
Because the Census surveys are scientifically conducted, each interview counts for 5,000 households. So Buckmon’s 100 extra fake interviews monthly would have resulted in falsified information on 500,000 households.
Census is now divided into just six regions across the US. So, tainted information coming from any one of these regions could affect the national data if the fraud is relatively widespread.
Buckmon’s fraud wasn’t unique and didn’t stop in Philadelphia when he was caught, a source said.
In fact, the practice, I was told, continues to the present day. In fact, this sort of cheating even has an informal name — “curbstoning,” for the habit of census workers sitting on the curb and filling out blank interviews themselves.
I’m told that Buckmon was assured by a supervisor a couple levels up that he’d be protected from punishment if his actions were discovered. A supervisor, likewise, said someone higher up was protecting him.
My source also said it was well understood around the Philadelphia office that the unemployment rate needed to go down right before the last presidential election. And, indeed, the jobless rate did have a significant drop two months before President Obama was returned to office.
There is no way for me to know if that decline was complements of Philadelphia’s actions — or was produced the old-fashioned way, by real people getting real jobs.
But I’m pretty sure a little data-mining by Congress can help figure that out.
Commerce has disputed everything I’ve alleged and defended its data-collecting practices, characterizing the Buckmon case as an isolated incident.
Commerce’s Office of the Inspector General is now investigating the incident and any other falsifications that might have occurred in Philadelphia. The OIG has interviewed census workers and is said to be cooperating with Congress.
The general counsel’s office at Commerce may be a different story. Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, on Nov. 19 asked for a load of Buckman documents, “including e-mails, between and among Census Bureau employees referring or relating to the collection of the Current Population Survey.” While it has started to produce some documents, Commerce has been slow to comply.
“The Commerce Department and the Census Bureau have been surprisingly hostile and noncooperative in their responses to basic requests for documents and interviews, considering their public posturing that there is ‘nothing to see here,’” according to a source close to the committee.
Even more interesting, Commerce’s general counsel office has suddenly taken a keen interest in the case and has, I’m told, been inundated with questions from outsiders.
Hopefully the legal guys at Commerce know enough not to coach the Census employees on what to say to Congress.
The investigation also is apparently putting a crimp in the business-as-usual atmosphere in the Philadelphia office, which, according to sources, came up short of the 90 percent response rate that Labor requires of its surveys.
While the final response was only fractionally short of 90 percent, even that level was achieved only after the December jobless survey deadline was extended, sources said.