the committee all information policy senses and national our cats will come to our good afternoon and welcome to today's hearing entitled the twenty t n master address files issues and concerns today's hearing will examine the quality and quantity of addresses in compensating the master address file before we begin today i would first extremely unfortunate unfortunate and a man sleep probably since his workers are doing a great civic duty for their country and it is intolerable that such violations occur or for that light to come in director groves on his efforts and concern for his employees it is evident that the safety and well being of census employees are of paramount we have twenty four members of parliament from four countries this week for a seminar on committee operations with an emphasis on organizing and holding public hearings the visiting members are observing video of a hearing a meeting with house staff and members to discuss the organization and conduct of hearings and i want to welcome those members of parliament here from the country of kenya as well as peru welcome and hopefully you will get something out of this hearing which i'm sure you will  and so without further ado on our panel we will hear first from dr robert groves director of the census bureau dr groves will provide the status of the bureau's ongoing efforts to compile and update the master address file and clued in lucca and its appeal process special gulf coast initiative address canvassing and group water  validation and welcome again dr ro we will then hear from government witnesses who will testify and assess the compilation of the master address file these witnesses will offer recommendations they believe will improve the bureau's efforts our final testimony will come from a stakeholder who will sir are his agent's concerns about census twenty two and she will provide her a actual experiences with hard to count population she was also offer practical solutions to aid in the partnership between the bureau and community based organizations and without objection the chair and ranking minority member will five minutes to make opening statements followed by opening statements not to exceed three minutes by any other member who seeks recognition without objection members and witnesses may have five legislative days to submit a written statement population was constitutionally mandated exercise has wide ramifications the results are used to apportion legislative districts at the federal and state level moreover the distribution of more than four hundred billion dollars annually in federal assistance of local state territorial and tribal governments rely upon this county civic press each marketability and regional political power also rest upon these numbers as we look forward to april first twenty two the subcommittee evaluates the status of the bureau's efforts to count all inhabitants of this the subcommittee today's hearing will focus on the bureau's progress in the compilation scheduling cost and transparency the master address file the subcommittee will explore all budgetary matters of view as interaction in cooperation with local and county governments community organizations stakeholders will further be explored the success of the census is dependent on the quality of the thank you for all of you who are participating in this and thank you very much for gas i hope you find this informative and and appreciate your joining us here today as we work on this very daunting huge ship massive task of trying to count every person in the united states of america timeline is short here we have less than six months to go and undoubtedly the challenges will be huge of particular concern that it might like to make sure it's the you know are we have to the task of making sure that everyone is is fairly counted that they're not under counted and they're not over counted and that we have the tools necessary in the technology in place in order to make that happen i have specific questions and concerns about the viability of the work force that is being hired in order to enumeration specifically the practice of hiring known criminals and other background checks in the fingerprinting have been an issue and i appreciate an update along the way and in that regard and then i'll have questions as to why we don't or to what degree we do utilize and tap into what we already do in the united states postal service they already have a federal workforce and hundreds of thousands of people go to every home and every address in this country i recognize some have post office boxes and whatnot and there are certain challenges with illegally subdivided homes and whatnot as ms jacobson sure will address but with that being said mapping out this country and why we are not more culturally aligned with a literally hundreds of thousands of people who do this on an almost everyday basis is something i think we it's worth at least a few questions along the way and so i look forward to your testimony appreciate the interaction  fifteenth two thousand and nine next we will hear from mr robert golden calf currently serves at the as the director of strategic issues at the government accountability office mr golden cop is responsible for reviewing various works have been published in the public administration review policy studies journal government executive and technology review thank you for being here next we will hear from mr todd zen's or inspector general  fraud waste and abuse in the vast array of businesses scientific economic and environmental programs and minister by the department and its thirteen bureau thank you mrs answer  coming today our final witness will meet will be miss eileen jacobs from california rural legal assistance ms jacobs is the director of litigation advocacy and training she has spent thirty years of her legal career as an advocate for housing and civil rights in low income communities and urban and rural united states ms jacobs taught housing law for the u c davis law school and women and allow for you book community college she obtained her be a from boston university in j v from the non western university school of law she is co author of the two publications on the undercount farm workers and indigenous groups in the census list jacobs is a c r l a delegate to the national twenty ten census advisory committee for which she is chair of an ad hoc subcommittee on hard to locate i'd like to ask like to ask you to raise your right hand and and repeat after me you solidly swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth thank you may be seated let the record reflect that the when witnesses answered in the affirmative each of you will have an opportunity to make an opening statement your complete written testimony will be included in the hearing record  census when i testified here on september twenty second i noted at that time set of professional judgments about the assessment of the two thousand and ten preparations and i noted at the end of this month we'd be finished with our internal evaluation the master address file i realize the schedules of the committee didn't work to have that time exactly right i'll tell you as much as we know i promise  today but there's still work to be done and i'd be happy to meet with the full committee or any subset that when we have that full report ready let me begin by reminding us of what the master address file is that it is literally an inventory of all the addresses and descriptions of units along with their geographical locations it is the source of the mailing of all the questionnaires and livery of  all forms so it is a big deal for the twenty tons and sis and the quality of that master address file is appropriately a target of the subcommittee scrutiny there are three major quality criteria that i'll talk about today one is its completeness its coverage do does it contain all of the housing units in the united states secondly are the addresses on each of those housing units complete can we mail our  physical descriptions can we mail our find housing units in our later operations and then third do we know where these units are is the spatial accuracy what what we need to have for successful census we've done three important things over the decade i think it's important to know that we're designed to improve the quality the master address file the first thing that was done is a reflection of what happened in two thousand there was a result of the two thousand census that there were more duplicate in this frame then were expected one source of the duplicate it's was had to do with group quarters housing units and we've blended those two lists together with the hope that that will reduce the kind of duplication we found in two thousand we've realigned all the the streets and roads in the country to reflect changes over the decade and we're fully using in cooperation with the postal service codes that determine how best to get to get forms to particular addresses whether we should mail them or deliver them ourselves we've also been updating this frame throughout the decade through again our cooperation with the postal service on the delivery sequence file and then through our own field work in the american community survey and other surveys specially in rural areas mr chairman you mentioned the circle luko program which is a local update of census addresses it plays as you know a critical role that's a key both symbolic and real cooperation with  local and state governments throughout the country as well as tribal governments this is an important part of building the master address file mr chairman i want to thank you along with representative maloney former ranking member of the subcommittee michael turner representative michael thompson and a former ranking member of the full committee representative tom davis for your support last year you wrote a de colleague letter in march and you help to spread the word about the lucca program to your colleagues on the hill and it helped as you'll see in just a few minutes we invited in two thousand seven about forth forty thousand different tribal state and local governments to participate in this local program about twelve thousand and eleven thousand five hundred of them registered about twenty nine percent of the governments are represented by that eleven thousand that's a disappointing number when you first see that but those governments represent about ninety two percent of the housing units in the country so that's kind of the first evaluation of lucca that one could mount and one way to evaluate is compared to what happened in two thousand in two thousand we had about eighteen thousand governments registered they represented less than ninety two percent of the total housing units in the country so overall on participation in lucca we had greater participation this decade than last and that's something that we are grateful for we receive submissions reflecting changes to our address less from most local governments from about seventy nine percent of the governments that had registered that's about eighty one hundred governments this compares to about sixty seven percent submission in the ninety eight luka and forty eight percent in the ninety nine looka so once again the participation the submission of these lists to us from the local governments is somewhat better than in two thousand another good sign we then matched these addresses supplied by local governments against the master address file and we send out all those addresses for the advance for the address canvassing operation that took place in the summer let me mention a couple of things about other improvements in the local update program we had a single cycle of review this this reduce the complexity of  participating governments we had a longer review period one hundred twenty days versus ninety we allowed a variety of ways to participate that seemed to fit the different problems local governments were facing we provided easy to use software that they could download on their desktops to help and for the first time we allowed state governments to represent lower governments within their states that partially explains the lower count participation of governments but the higher percentage of housing units represented the palm unary figures from this program show that about eight million addresses were provisionally added to the master address file for verification thirty million of the addresses vetted by the local update program matched addresses already on the file and we had two hundred two million corrections to addresses then as you know over the summer in two thousand and nine census bureau staff walked every street road in the country and visited one hundred forty five million locations that can that represent about thirty five thousand households of one hundred thirty four million i can give you the results of these of the address canvassing work about ninety eight million addresses on that list of one hundred forty five million were verified as is twenty million were corrected usually that was a street named correction small changes five million were moved to another block ten million were added they weren't on the address list before and they were on the lucca submission less so at the current time the master address file consists of about one hundred  thirty four million records that turns out to match independent estimates of the housing unit count that's a good good sign so far in our comparisons the the figures show that about twenty one million addresses fall into either a delete or duplicate or nonresidential category sixteen million of those were deletes that is we couldn't find them when we got out there and about four million were duplicate it's that were found from other found to exist in other places in in the master address file about a million of the addresses we had on the list were nonresidential they've now been  two million them were called other living quarters and these are things like assisted living facilities dormitories group homes and we sort of set those aside and right now as we speak there are people visiting those group corridors because that was a problem in two thousand making sure we had all the unit identifications right in those groups us all of these were out there right now making sure we have correct unit identifiers and that's going to pay off  come spring when we do the measurement with respect to the results of address canvassing on the local update cases themselves our initial results show that about sixty six percent of the luca addresses were deleted identified as duplicate or found to be nonresidential about twenty nine percent of the addresses were verified corrected or moved and about and i'm happy to get back to you when we have all of the evaluative results on that program you know that we have other programs that will improve hopefully the master address file where right now out asking these same local governments to give us new construction updates we've invited about twenty nine thousand governments to participate in this about fifteen thousand have already said yes and we're of running on that we are also going to make other updates to this file we're not through for two thousand and ten we will get other updates from the u s postal service from the delivery sequence file we're going to have a review program that's going to go out early and in two thousand and ten and then we're going to have updates from other field operations our attempt and this is to get the most up to date master address file we can so let me sum up i said there are three of value to of criteria for the master address file coverage is first relative to two thousand noted that fewer governments participated in the local update program but they represented a higher proportion of all addresses in the country than than two thousand i noted that state and local governments provided addresses that form about two percent of the total valid addresses on the file after address canvassing and after address canvassing the total number of units on the file is comparable to an independent estimate of the count of housing units in the country the second criteria is the completeness of address  addresses and we found about two million other living quarters that are now being really visited to get those addresses right those identifiers right we're expecting a lot of these to revert to a single housing unit  by the time we're through with this operation we continue to evaluate the current status of the master address file and i'm hopeful that i could talk more about this  in a later hearing in front of this committee i thank the committee for this opportunity to testify look forward to your questions thank you dr grove we know you you hit the ground running at the census bureau and we thank you for your service was to go to be reckoned five minutes mr chairman ranking member mccann members of the subcommittee i am pleased to be here today to discuss the census bureau's progress in building a complete and accurate address list as you know a quality address list along with precise maps are key to a successful census if the bureau's address list and maps are inaccurate people can be missed captain more than once or include in the wrong location that said compiling an accurate address list is no easy task one reason for this is that people can reside in hidden and nontraditional housing units such as converted attics and basements as well as in cars boats trailers motels tent cities and labor camps while these living arrangements have long existed the large number of foreclosures the nation has recently experienced as well as the natural disasters that hit the gulf coast and other regions have likely increase the number of people living in less conventional housing in addition to housing units which include single family homes apartments and mobile homes many people also resigned in facilities called group quarters which include prisons dormitories news nursing homes and similar locations the bureau's database of the nation's roughly one hundred forty million addresses it's called the master ratch rest file or math as requested my testimony will describe the preliminary results of three map building operations that can help locate hidden housing units and other traditionally hard to count populations the operations we reviewed are lucca address canvassing and group quarters validation i will also provide an update on the i t systems the bureau use to update and extract information from the map database my testimony today has two main points forest the bureau goes to great lengths to ensure the accuracy of the address file using multiple operations that include partnerships with the postal service extensive field verifications and numerous other activities second the operations we reviewed generally proceeded as planned and we did not observe any significant operational setbacks still the overall effectiveness bureau's efforts will not be known until later in the census when the bureau completes various assessments turning first to lucca the bureau apartment with state local and tribal governments tapping into their knowledge of local populations and and housing conditions in order to develop a more complete and accurate address list more than eight thousand jurisdictions participated in the program between november two thousand and seven and march two thousand eight hundred lucas submissions generated a relatively small percentage of additions to the math for example of around thirty six million potential additions that locality submitted just two point four million or seven percent were new addresses not already in the math the others were duplicate addresses non existent or nonresidential address canvassing finished ahead of schedule in part because of improvements the bureau made to the handheld computers used to collect data as well as because of lower than expected employee turnover nevertheless the operation exceeded its original budget estimate of three hundred fifty six million dollars by eighty eight million dollars a cost overrun of twenty five percent a key reason for the over on was at the bureau it did not update its cost estimates to reflect changes to the address canvassing workload further the bureau did not follow its staffing strategy and hired too many listers recognizing the difficulties associated with address canvassing in the hurricane affected areas along the gulf coast the bureau develops supplemental training materials to help a listers identify addresses where people are or may be living when census questionnaires are distributed early next year for example the materials noted that people might be living in trailers homes marked for demolition and nonresidential spaces such a storage areas above restaurants to help ensure a group quarters are accurately included in the census the bureau is conducting an operation called group quotas validation which is going on right now the census bureau developed and tested new procedures to improve how it identifies and counts these facilities based on lessons learned from the two thousand census with respect to the automated system that supports the math although the bureau has improved aspects of  management we continue to be concerned about the lack of finalize test plans incomplete metrics to gauge progress and an aggressive test implementation schedule going forward in summary the bureau has taken extraordinary measures to produce a quality asterisk list and associated math still accurately locating each and every dwelling in the nation is inherently challenging and never and the overall quality of the bureau's as restless will not be known until later in the cens and five minutes thank you mr chairman ranking member mchenry members of the subcommittee we appreciate the opportunity to testify today about the census bureau's master address file my testimony covers three points mr chairman first the building the master had to address a file is an enormously important and enormously complex undertaking second my office is focused a lot of our work on the census operations used to build the file and not surprisingly given the enormity of the task the operations are prone to errors errors and omissions third is census continues to work very hard to carry out operations to improve the master address file and compensate for those errors and omissions  the execution of those operations is critically important the census bureau describes an accurate comprehensive and timely list as one of the best predictors of a successful census errors on the master address file can cause people to be missed or counted more than once as well as increased costs and the public burdened by requiring enumerators to visit nonexistent or duplicate look during the nonresponse follow up operation after the two thousand census the bureau launched an ambitious plan to maintain an update both the master address file and the census maps through a variety of operations they accomplished some of their plans but still relied on a massive address canvassing operation at the end of the decade as the primary operation for verifying updating or deleting addresses adding missing addresses updating streets on the maps and geocoding every structure address canvassing employs one hundred forty thousand temporary workers and cost over four hundred million dollars not including the cost of the handheld computers our work over the decade on the master address file has identified consistent problems we observe the two thousand and six site test in austin in the cheyenne river reservation the two thousand and eight dress rehearsal and the address canvassing operation itself might written statement includes examples of the types of errors in a mission we observed in those operations including missing duplicated in iranian master address file addresses problems with listers not following procedures and other problems with process and execution our work in this area has caused us to have concerns about the overall quality of the address list the census bureau has operations designed to update to two thousand and nine address list and potentially mitigate some of the issues that affect master address file reliability these include group quarters validation the luke appeals process new construction adds an update leave an update these represent some of the most significant efforts planned and underway to strengthen and update the master address file it is critically important that the bureau execute these operations well i believe the census is working hard to do so however if we were to be asked what other actions the census bureau could take at this point we would offer two suggestions that could assess the quality of the master address file right now and provide information that could be used in subsequent improvement operations and potentially provide the opportunity for additional address list corrections first census should take advantage of housing unit estimates to help assess master address file quality for the past twenty years the bureau has produced annual estimates of housing units for states counties and local governments these statistics are used as controls for several census bureau surveys and could be used for the descending will as benchmarks against which potential over or under counting of housing could be measured for example after census two thousand count comparisons for over eight hundred of the nation's most rural counties in the case of potential under coverage in two hundred seventy five of the counties use of housing estimates could identify these types of discrepancies now before the descending will census and perhaps steps could be taken to address them second the bureau could make greater use of administrative records as another source for checking address quality such records collected by all levels of government and the private sector are used by census  conducting several of his statistical operations by matching current administrative records to the master address file senses could both assess master address file quality and potentially add missing addresses even if the bureau determines that incorporating missed addresses identified in this process would not be feasible at this stage of the descending there would still be benefits to assessing the address file and identifying areas where addresses are missing it would allow subsequent field operations to be alerted on a targeted basis of the high potential for an accurate list for that area and the need for greater attention to those areas mr chairman this completes my summary and i would be happy to respond to any questions thank you very much mrs answer  thank you thank you mr chairman and thank you ranking member mchenry and members of the subcommittee for good me this opportunity to speak to you today about the master address file and to recommend improvements with respect to the development of the master address file i was glad to hear dr groves refer to the master address file as a big deal and i'd like to reiterate his statement it is a very big deal particularly to the very hard to count populations that we represent throughout the twenty one rural offices of california rural legal assistance our mission is to ameliorate rural poverty and to ensure that rural communities have access to justice and the provision of basic human rights therefore we very much understand the importance of an accurate census and having accurate census data which starts with an accurate master address file and i'd like to speak about the adverse impact in the communities we represent of having a less than accurate master address file and make some very practical recommendations for improvements we represent the hardest to count populations in the hardest to locate housing we represent farm workers rural poor immigrants very diverse racial and ethnic groups linguistically isolated populations elderly disabled and most recently many foreclosure victims throughout rural california an inaccurate master address file in a mail out mail back census means that our clients do not have adequate housing they lack health care they don't have job training they have fewer educational opportunities lower literacy they have fewer needed municipal services like basic water and sewer they lack community and economic development programs and resources and it's harder to invest in force the fundamental right s that they have guaranteed by law the direct impact on local government is very serious because they lack the oladi to meet the pressing needs of the hardest to count populations there are social and economic costs not only to our clients but to the local governments that are there to serve them my prepared statement describes the structural bias in the development of the master address file my involvement with the census bureau and concern about the master address file that started when after the one nine hundred ninety census we participated in a study that measured and at least fifty percent what we called mega undercount of migrant seasonal farmworkers and we attribute much of that mega undercount to missing housing units not exclusively but a significant part of that and the structural bias in the development of the master address file has not been solved i give a lot of credit to the census bureau for making improvements in instructions to address lister's about hidden housing units and what types of units to include in the address file but we still have the problem of complete omission of entire households because in the hardest account areas in areas of high concentration of hidden housing units the master address file is incomplete and if the master address file for two thousand and ten is incomplete that means that the master address file for use in the american community survey census bureau's replacement for the long form also will be incomplete and that will result not only in omission of housing units but omission of of people and it will carry into the american community survey a skewed set of demographic characteristics of the most needy populations particularly diverse racial and ethnic groups and the hardest to count populations that we represent i have had five key points and five key recommendations in our written testimony first the hard to locate housing units in rural california and elsewhere need to be understood they are backyard chicken coops they are illegal garages they are tool shed that are rented out to families to live in they are single family units and apartments that are subdivided into essentially one room per complex household and that can be a family or an extended family per room in a six apartment dwelling they are motel rooms that are occupied by twenty migrant seasonal farm workers at a time they are trailer encampments they are and lean tos built into canyons and the kind of housing that isn't acceptable in this country but nevertheless it is spread throughout rural california and there are many similarities to concentrated urban areas when we talk about these hidden in illegal housing units and in our study after the two thousand census and i refer to that in my written testimony we found that a very high percentage of these types of units were missed in the seven communities that we evaluated using the census bureau's methodology secondly address canvassing does not adequately identify these units albeit improvements have been made thirdly ultimately as i said it skews the population profile because the hidden units tend to be occupied is the population pro