Rep. Ed Towns Calls Hearing On Census Fraud, Is Willing To Count Brooklynites Himself
Two Census Bureau managers from a Brooklyn field office may face criminal charges for allegedly faking more than 4,000 surveys. In a hearing Monday morning at the Brooklyn Borough Hall Courthouse, Todd Zinser, the Inspector General of the Department of Commerce, stated that he believes the managers violated a federal law that makes it a felony to falsify census records.
Rep. Ed Towns, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called the hearing to investigate whether the Census Bureau is following the necessary steps to ensure that every Brooklynite is counted. Representatives Charles Rangel, Yvette Clark, and William Lacy Clay, Chair of the Information Policy, Census and National Archives Subcommittee, joined Towns in hearing testimonies from Census Bureau director Dr. Robert Groves, Inspector General Todd Zinser, and Regional Director Tony Farthing.
Farthing, who has worked for the Census Bureau for 30 years, said that this is the first time he has known a manager to use arbitrary information to complete forms and order employees to do the same. “In my years working here, this is the first time I’ve seen that,” he said. “I’ve never had managers take that step to order employees to do what they ordered them to do.”
The falsification in the Northeast Brooklyn office occurred during the weekend of June 12, and the issue came to light via email complaints send to the OIG hotline by office workers who refused to take part. Zinser says the managers filled in the surveys with information gleaned from an online database called FastData. At first, it was reported that there were approximately 10,000 cases of potential falsification, but after investigating the incident, the IG says that only 4,221 household records in the affected neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvestant, Bushwick, and Greenpoint needed to be redone.
On July 7, Zinser referred the investigation to the attorney general’s office. Out of nearly 700 complaints received by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), 400 have been investigated by the Census Bureau, but this is the only incident to be sent to the attorney general.
Remediation efforts included assigning employees from other Brooklyn census offices to re-enumerate every potentially fake questionnaire, but this only led to more problems. The OIG received two more complaints alleging that the employees were inferring the number of household residents through improper means, like counting the names on mailboxes or noting the presence of pets. The bureau is re-working all the affected cases, and further investigating. Despite the setbacks, Farthing says that re-enumeration is 80 percent complete, and Groves still expects to finish conducting surveys by the end of the month.
"I can assure you that all of the operations we need to do to follow-up on any rework that we will discover or we have discovered, we will finish those up at a professional level and taking the time to do it right," said Groves. "We have the time to do that." He added that they are redoing more work that they think was affected to ensure total accuracy.
Historically, Brooklyn is one of the hardest areas in the nation to count. The massive amount of apartment buildings, high rise housing units, and homes above businesses make it extremely difficult for census workers to knock on doors. On top of that, Brooklyn has large numbers of every group that is statistically least likely to mail back a survey: young singles, African American men, public-housing residents, and a constantly changing mix of immigrants.
Rep. Clarke, whose Congressional district was directly affected by the fraud, said that 40 percent of the residents in her district are foreign born immigrants, and nearly half of those people have yet to obtain naturalized citizenship. "This extremely vulnerable population is already concerned with sharing private information with the government for fear of compromising their immigration status," said Clarke. "Therefore, when incidences of fraud arise regarding Census information, it is deeply troubling to both myself and my constituents because of the potential impact it has on fragile participation rates altogether."
Rep. Clarke also urged the census officials to begin discussing how to increase immigrant participation in the census, saying that the city suffers because it doesn't get as accurate count as it could. "We need a strategy to deal with immigrant populations, a very examined strategy for the 2020 Census," she said. "New York City is a gateway for immigrants. It has been since the beginning of time and it will be for many generations to come. I don’t think its acceptable for us to not look at this, knowing its indicative of this particular, area and not come up with a very specific remedy to address it."
According to Groves, census operations nationwide are nearly complete. Currently, the OIG is completing quality assurance, where they review all information collected through surveys and interviews, and for households that still haven't responded, employees are making phone calls and house visits at last attempts. Rep. Towns asked for more employees to be sent to Brooklyn offices to help finish the count and said that he supports whatever is necessary to raise the borough's response rate
"If it requires elected officials going door to door to help you get in, we're prepared to make that kind of commitment to you. There are so many things riding on this accurate count, in terms of money for housing, money for food stamps, money for education, money for all of these things are riding on this count," Rep. Towns said. "This is something that we do not take lightly."
Photo via The Daily News
