5. The Bureau’s Stretch Goals to Complete Nonresponse Follow- up May Have Produced Mixed Results

To help ensure that local census offices completed nonresponse follow-up  on schedule, the bureau developed ambitious interim stretch goals. These goals called on local census offices to finish 80 percent of their  nonresponse follow-up workload within the first 4 weeks of the operation  and be completely finished by the end of the eighth week. Under the  bureau’s master schedule, local census offices had 10 weeks to complete the operation. Our review  highlighted several strategies that were key to the bureau’s success  including (1) an aggressive outreach and promotion campaign and other  efforts aimed at boosting the mail response rate and lowering the bureau’s  nonresponse follow-up workload; (2) a flexible recruiting strategy that  made the bureau a competitive employer in a tight national labor market;  (3) advance planning for addressing location-specific enumeration  challenges; and (4) ambitious stretch goals that encouraged local managers  to accelerate the pace of the operation. It will also be important for the bureau to address the continuing significant  challenges that were revealed by the conduct of nonresponse follow-up in  2000, including achieving an acceptable response rate (and thus lowering the bureau’s  follow-up workload) while controlling costs; reversing the downward trend in public participation in the census, in  part by converting the relatively large number of people who are aware  of the census into census respondents; keeping the address list and maps used for nonresponse follow-up finding the right mix of incentives to motivate local census offices to  complete nonresponse follow-up on schedule without compromising  data quality; and ensuring that reinterview procedures provide sufficient quality  assurance coverage through the full duration of enumerators’  employment on nonresponse follow-up. Our draft report stated: “One reason for the errors in the nonresponse  follow-up address lists was that the bureau found it was infeasible to  remove late-responding households. As a result, enumerators needed to  visit over 773,000 households that had already mailed back their  questionnaires. We verified this information and added it to the report.
What GAO Found

Nonresponse follow-up--in which Census Bureau enumerators go door-to-door to count individuals who have not mailed back their questionnaires--was the most costly and labor intensive of all 2000 Census operations. According to Bureau data, labor, mileage, and administrative costs totaled $1.4 billion, or 22 percent of the $6.5 billion allocated for the 2000 Census. Several practices were critical to the Bureau's timely competition of nonresponse follow-up. The Bureau (1) had an aggressive outreach and promotion campaign, simplified questionnaire, and other efforts to boost the mail response rate and thus reduce the Bureau's nonresponse follow-up workload; (2) used a flexible human capital strategy that enabled it to meet its national recruiting and hiring goals and position enumerators where they were most needed; (3) called on local census offices to identify local enumeration challenges, such as locked apartment buildings and gated communities, and to develop action plans to address them; and (4) applied ambitious interim "stretch" goals that encouraged local census offices to finish 80 percent of their nonresponse follow-up workload within the first four weeks and be completely finished by the end of the eighth week, as opposed to the ten-week time frame specified in the Bureau's master schedule. Although these initiatives were key to meeting tight time frames for nonresponse follow-ups, the Bureau's experience in implementing them highlights challenges for the next census in 2010. First, maintaining the response rate is becoming increasingly expensive. Second, public participation in the census remains problematic. Third, the address lists used for nonresponse follow-up did not always contain the latest available information because the Bureau found it was infeasible to remove many late-responding households. Fourth, the Bureau's stretch goals appeared to produce mixed results. Finally, there are questions about how reinterview procedures aimed at detecting enumerator fraud and other quality problems were implemented.