hearing with an update of operations from doctor our new census director this is dr gross first apparent before the information policy subcommittee so welcome dr after dr grows his presentation i will have questions for dr grows along with the ranking minority member in the second part of the hearing we will hear testimony regarding the twenty opening statements after dr grove has update of census operations other members seeking recognition will hold their opening statements until the second part of the hearing where they can make opening statements not to exceed three minutes without objection members and witnesses may have five legislative days to submit a written statement of materials for the record let me start with an introduction of our new cens michigan survey survey research center and research professor at the joint program survey methodology to university of maryland dr grow a fellow of the sounds better thank you chairman quayle ranking member mchenry and other members of the subcommittee i appreciate this opportunity for being here upon my confirmation promise to congress and secretary locke that i would spend the first month of my directorships evaluating the key components of the twenty tons of this i've done that the reason for this as you know as this committee knows well is that the difficulties with the handheld computer development in the middle of the decade required a major replanning and many things have happened since those events in two thousand and eight but i needed to take time to make my own professional assessment assessment let me give you a sense of how i did this before i arrived plans were in development to bring on two consultants former census bureau director can prove it and former principal associate director john thompson they are in place they were in place when i arrived and i've used them greatly to tell me on this risk assessment i've also consulted with members of the national academy of sciences panels of the census i've reached out to a lot of key academics scientists around the country and actually around the world with relevant technical skills i've met with the staff who offer independent evaluations of major census to the days and then i have had just tons of productive meetings with the administrative and technical leadership with the census this says given me the basis of what i will report today i have four different kinds of comments i want to tell you my assessment of the two thousand and ten census as a survey methodology this design on paper as it will as it were i'll go through some external challenges i see facing the two thousand and ten census are going through internal challenges and then i want to report on changes i've made to census experimental programs first  let's look at the design of the two thousand and ten census i can say with absolute assurance as a professional survey methodology is that if i wrote down the design features of the two thousand census next to the design features of tw census i would take the two thousand and ten census in a flash this is a better design and i'm sure most of my colleagues around the world would agree with this why do i say this using only the short form of the questionnaire is a good idea this will this should help encourage public participation sending bilingual questionnaires to thirteen million households first for the census is a good idea we've known for decades that supplying people replacement questionnaires if they don't return the first one is a good idea that should increase cooperation and you know i'm sure this committee knows that there are two new questions in the short for questionnaire specially designed to improve the coverage properties of the census these are good ideas you also know that the master address file was updated updated throughout the decade and that should give us a better set of addresses from which we redo our mailing a new operation called group quarters validation that's going to go on in just a few weeks should improve the quality of our listings on crucial kinds of houses that are hard to cover dormitories multi unit structures and so on and then as this committee knows better than i the the additional funding provided by the american reinvestment recovery act is making a difference for our partnership in outreach activities and in a major way so with this kind of assessment i say again it's an easy judgment that we would that most professionals would prefer the two thousand and ten design but it's appear your design doesn't make for necessarily for a superior product and so i want to speak to a set of challenges that i see remaining for me and my colleagues at the the census bureau and i'll start with a set of internal challenges first the replan of the census and two thousand eight hundred on a new leadership team with fewer censuses under their belt than we've seen in past decades decades this weakness however in my judgment is countered by a much more formal and open and transparent risk management process that was adopted during the replanning and to bolster this further i've decided to continue vigorous use of external advisors both through existing contracts and with john thompson and can it further i'm extremely fortunate to have deputy undersecretary for economic affairs nancy potok who was recently appointed who's a former principal associate director with whom i enjoy consultative relationships suck and the second internal challenge like a lot of federal agencies the census bureau has experienced significant retirements and senior ranks i'm especially concerned about this at the senior mathematical statistical ranks while we're trying to aggressively recruit new talent i will attempt to bring in some outside  of that nature third as you know because of the replanning of the census away from the handhelds for the non response follow up stage we are using paper based operations the control system for those operations is being written as we speak with a talented group of programmers and suit them but this phase of development is very tightly scheduled and it's worth concern as you know a recent g a o report called for a complete indian test of of this paper based operation control system  and i've examined that recommendation and met with a lot of people about the testing process for this system the current plan within the census bureau is to have an integrated test of key of course sub systems of the overall design i asked for an outside review of the definition of what that core meant and that review satisfied me that the definition does indeed represent what should be tested that will also be a large load test of this control system around thanksgiving which should attempt to simulate the full operational load i've also asked that this test include real users at the skill levels of the users of the system during production i've asked that the testing design includes sequential test one of each of the planned releases of the software we have  census two simulated local census offices one it suit learn and one in stockton california they'll be key components of the test to make the test realistic and support support that design i should also note that we've created an internal review team over the software development led by our new c e o brian mcgrath it also contains the chief technical officer of commerce and other experts they've already provided value added in my belief three changes had been made based on their input that should improve the overall design and implementation of the software and i look forward to other changes from the group the fourth internal challenge is that it at this day on this day we do not yet know the quality of the master address file we're going to know that in a matter of weeks when we know that we will have in my hope greater assurance that we have a master address file that will serve us well in the in the following stages i'd be happy to report to you on those findings when we have them if i believe there's a current challenge regarding cost estimation and cost control within the dessen the l census operations and the census bureau more broadly in my belief we need better cost estimation and control that the bureau one finding of the review of the address canvassing operation that you may know about was that the cost models used to estimate to use to guide the work didn't forecast the total cost completely well we have to strengthen the cost information and control system within the bureau already intervened in prophecies to tighten that up for non response follow up which is a very large organ of activity that will take place in the summer of next year so these are the five principal internal challenges in my belief there are four ext challenges i believe one and the most important for this committee and for me and for all the leadership of the country is estimating the mail return right what will the american public do when we send them out these  forms this is a very difficult thing to estimate this is something i've spent my life trying to estimate so i know that the difficulty the reason it's difficult to estimate is that the population has changed in the last ten years in this recession the vacancy rate of households is much higher than it was in two thousand more and more families are doubling up and houses due to foreclosures and and other events the rate of people experiencing homelessness is higher and at the same time we have a public debate and the tension over immigration issues and then five in other surveys that we've been doing the response rates are declining throughout the decade all of these things point to some difficulty in estimating what's going to happen when we mail out forms to the american public will they return them that's a very important thing as this committee kno because for each one percentage point mis estimation of that large sums of money are involved in sending people out to follow up so we have to get that right that's a big external challenge second we're in a new media environment relative to two thousand you know this well more and more people get the news from nontraditional sources we're doing all we can to to learn about the blogosphere and how it's go affect the image of the census bureau on the behavior of the american public we've launched a media response team that's where that's meeting every wednesday morning to help us get the facts out about some success in a way that may benefit the return right third there's a challenge for which i need your help i'm asking members accom congress and all census takers stakeholders to to work with us to ensure that the census is not tainted by intense political debates driving the news media i can't stress this point strongly enough if the public believes that the census data are slanted bipartisan influence of one side or the other the credibility of the statistics is destroyed once destroyed the public trust can't be easily or quickly restored  and we're in deep trouble both as a census bureau as a census and as a country and i believe the fourth external challenge is that we live in a digital environment that raises the threat of internet scams and cyber crimes like fishing and the widespread use of the census bureau logo and the brand i've directed the chief information officer of the census bureau to us stablish a team that unites our i t security officials with experts from the private sector and i'd be happy to report on this in the near future about how we're going to swoop in on fake websites that appear to be census bureau websites  those are the internal and external challenges let me tell you four things that i've done to change features of the experimental program in the census number one the first concerns the census coverage measurement program which is used to measure differential undercount as you know this design has come to under some criticism of the national academy of sciences and that has to do with a very late interviewing start this is the mechanism by which we measure the quality of the census i'm concerned about the quality of the recall of where people were in a pub on april one when they fall into the sample i'm concerned about the quality of the matching operations i have brought together a group of statistician's from around the country to give us advice about how to be thought the quality of the measurement of the census coverage program at the risk of the sample size of this this is a trade off decision but in the professional judgment of the statisticians that i think consulting it appears that we can build a better quality estimate of the census if we cut some of the sample and put more money into the quality of the measurement second we'll develop a master trace project that will follow cases through the census cycle this will be a research tool to understand  the trade off of operations and the quality impacts third we've all mountain internet measurement reinterview study for the census that will focus on how people behave differently when they fill out a web questionnaire versus a paper questionnaire this will be a critical component of looking forward about how we use internet measurement and then fourth we will mount a post hoc administrative records census using administrative record  data systems we have within the census bureau micro linking them to returns and the census to ask the question if we had done and had none of right of census in two thousand and ten what kinds of people would have been included what kind of people had been missed and how are the data reported how are the attributes of people reported versus their self reports comparing their self reports to administrative records so i've gone through internal and external challenges and also have given you four changes i've made the internal challenges the uncertainty that i'm most concerned about are the programming tasks on the paper based operations control system and not yet known quality of the master address file but i want to emphasize this is strongly as i can these uncertainties mr chairman are swamped by the uncertainties about how the american public are going to respond when we send out this questionnaire and it is this that we should focus on i think as the leadership of this country because this is the single most important thing we can coalesce around to improve the quality of the census my clock is not working and i don't know how i'm doing on time but you do and just let me say a few things about the communications  plan and let me know if i'm going to wrong here i want to turn to the integrated communications plan because i know you're interested in this you know why this is important because it's a chief tool to improve the male response rate to address differential undercount and to assure at that last stage when we send out a numerators to knock on doors that will understand why they're there why they're there and we'll cooperate with them now i understand before i came on board the subcommittee had a briefing on this program i think it was the last spring so i won't go over the entire program but we'd happy to i'd be happy to give you a more formal briefing later if you want i directed associate director steve jones to do a complete scrub of the communications campaign when he came in that he was there a little before i was there and the goals of this program articulated at that point were to target traditionally hard to count and link linguistically isolated groups to improve their male response rates but also to help increase the overall male response rate in order to reduce the workload on the non response follow up operation non response follow up operation that i paper based pretty labor intensive operation in addition there was in place an academic assessment panel and we use them to give us guidance and feedback and ideas to improve the communications campaign and then as i've already mentioned through the a a r a money hundred million dollars was added to advertising activities we can increase our paid media efforts with that extra money including forty three million dollars specifically for local advertising by the the balance of those stimulus funds will be directed to partnerships support the public relations to the census in the schools program that i think you've been briefed on already and to the implementation of a tw tour with that additional funding in adjusted dollars we're now exceeding the scope of the two thousand census communications campaign more over because funds are available in fiscal year twenty zero nine which can be used for the advance purchases of advertising time these funds are expected to provide greater exposure of the census bureau's message than and in two thousand and there's a reason for this more of the money proportionally more of the money is targeted to lower response areas than was true in the two thousand effort that was more nationally targeted at this point the non response follow up media buys haven't been fully planned negotiated or bought but our target frequency is more than five contacts over the course of the non response follow up campaign if our estimates are right on this the american public will see the census bureau image and get the message many times throughout this campaign it's small tight targeted multimedia multi lingual and to my joy a research based one part of the plan already in place is to allow will allow us to assess and respond to potential issues stemming from the replan and that is a continuous tracking and monitoring system so this will be an advertising campaign for which will have ongoing near real time data of how things are going money has been held back to retarget if we need to focus on areas that are showing unexpected results let me give you kind of a hit parade of the things are the features we've expanded the number of languages in the paid advertising campaign from fourteen to twenty eight we've rebadge the website that will actually go live in a few weeks i urge you and your staff to look this one of fly that should be kind of cool we've upgraded the census in the schools program expanding it from k to eight to k to twelve in twenty eight different languages expanded  plans in the scope of the census road tour something that was quite successful in two thousand and we've doubled the sampling of the national partnership office and they're working together with their colleagues in other functional areas at  bureau and then we've expanded our language assistance programs in a variety of ways using it advance letter and other tools mr chairman ranking member mchenry you asked in a recent letter i think it was september ninth that you sent to me for updated budget estimates for advertising among the specific population groups  and we're in the middle of launching media negotiations for a national and local advertising by as we think by light october early november we'll be in shape to give you all of the that you deserve and you'd like to know and be happy to meet with you at that time those are my remarks i'm happy to be here with you and i thank you for your interest and be happy to answer your question thank you so much census day which is just over well just six months away less than six months away dr grose congratulations on your appointment and getting through the process and we're very happy here at the bureau and we welcome you for the committee thank you and i also do want to take a moment and then make you for your decisive leadership when it came to the issue of acorn this was an issue that not all of us have raised but i am particular raised repeatedly  before your point meant and my concern was what you mentioned in your testimony about other things is the credibility of the bureau and the brand the census brand and its use by other organizations and so i commend you for your decisive action there i know it hasn't won wide acclaim but i think it's important to the integrity of the census and thank you so much for that  what happened with the address canvassing and how successful that was they said at that time that there would likely be a report in early november is that still the case i know we're doing the analysis and processing on that file right now we're we've we've increased the kind of diagnostics we're seeking out of the file whether that date is exactly the right date we'll certainly have information about that time i would be happy to share with you as soon as we have that this is a very important component as you know that i get this thing right now you mentioned in your testimony that master address file looks like whether it's that they they know and we and want to add to that so we went out to that file we went out and believe it or not visited one hundred forty five different address one hundred forty five million different  addresses in the country so every address in the country basically was visited on ninety eight percent of those we took g p s coordinates to help locate them and we verified whether we could find the unit forwarded and when we had trouble locating you know couldn't find the unit or it was missed in space it was miss coded as we say then we made a note of that  and that process will identify some of those could not be found there were they were a common reason for that is that there is a plan to build a subdivision a small subdivision building permits may have been lots and in this recession the houses were built but they're planned to be built and in those kind of cases we would mark those for potential delete we actually keep the records on the file but we wouldn't be part of it wouldn't be part of the mailing operation so that process is pretty pretty massive but it's likely your target date is sometime in november i appreciate it and we hope to have you back you know a time or two before march of next year as well to make sure that we're sort of up to date we know what needs to be communicated and what other members of congress can help communicate for the bureau as well we'd love to do that in fact the knowing and getting are getting the word out about what are the next operations that we're doing for example we're mounting this big group quarters validation operation just a couple weeks we're out there listing for the coverage measurement study and the more we get the word out through you and receive your questions i think the better  the whole country is for the census and all of additional questions on the communications effort but there's one story that a constituent told me he said that he's working as yard one day and individual gentlemen came by and said i thought well actually he's trying to save you money so he can just mail you something you can respond back and so the communications effort is going to be very important so that when that guy's working i yards and somebody from the census comes by he goes oh i didn't mail in my form so there's some awareness there certainly appreciate that and and i think it's the committee as well as congress on a bipartisan basis to make sure that we have the money there are the resources there are necessary so that we can get the message out and communicate effectively across every community in this country as a constitution mandates and in you testimony your written testimony says and what you in essence said one of the findings in our review of the address canvassing operation was that the cost models used to guide the work did not forecast correctly total cost and we experience a cost overrun in components of that operation we need to strengthen our cost information management structures within the census bureau can you go to further detail about the man and maybe the components that experience c but an unexpectedly large workload so the size of the number of addresses that we went out with was larger than we thought now why did that happen well this was the first decade where we had continuous updates and so we were receiving from the postal service routinely through the decade more and more addresses and this was kind of the first opportunity to go out there and check all those estimating that was a hard thing to do and  half of the overrun is higher workload the most troubling part of the overrun for me from my perspective is about a thirty million dollars component of the overrun that had to do with a component of work that occurred if we found one of those addresses as a potential delete you couldn't find the address then appropriately and to the i think to the  benefit to the census bureau there were quality control procedures to follow up to make sure that that really was something that should have been deleted and those were costly operations part of the asian had to do with not anticipating so many deletes out of the file because in two thousand there weren't as many proportionally so that was the kind of mis estimation what we're doing right now because of that you know that operation is over we can't save the money that was spent but we can put in place procedures to try to prevent such overruns from happening in the future and they're kind of two things happening now for non response follow up costs us to make sure we're doing a big scrub assumptions at a high level and that will produce a new estimate and then we're going to bring in folks at the operations level and build what some people term a bottom up cost model we're actually going to have to cost estimation procedures and when they don't agree we're going to fight about what's the right assumption and i think that fighting is really a healthy kind of thing  component related to non response follow up this is this is the may june july big push ok and so there are some lessons out of that one you mentioned before is that you had well that  you mentioned his test which is that it highly qualified applicants and you didn't have to have those additional interviews and so you could see some savings next year on not having to have regions now and in every region that i've been to the story is the same this horrible recession or going through has a benefit for us and the benefit is more comes of better quality and once they're hired they don't quit they work as many hours as they can possibly get this is all very good for us that a lot of address canvassing we've got and it's adjusting targeting for hiring of non response follow up i guarantee you that ok so those assumptions are and you're going to have some more estimates going forward for this committee absolutely i would be happy to share things with you you know this is tough work i don't i don't wan it's easy because you're making predictions about future behaviors that you can't really observe but we're going to do it honestly we're going to use multiple methods and all i thought was a career you've chosen for yourself i know i know  a career estimate yeah you know as a as a component of this are there any any specifics any specific ideas for controlling these costs that you could give us as an example yeah there's a real easy example on the thing we were just talking about every survey organization every census around the world hires more people than they think they need to do the upport your actions let me let me ask you about the what actions do you plan on taking for the non response follow up a ration  avoid similar calls over to those experience and the address canvassing operation anything different i think the first thing to note and i haven't started yet today  response well it's a tougher job it's a job that's done in the evenings and on weekends you have to go to an address when people are at home and so the activities of address canvassing are only partially informative to us about what's going to happen and that's just a caution about how difficult it is but some of the things we're putting in place are those that will give us more information at a lower level of detail at the about how in different local census offices how different assignment areas are responding do we need more resources in one place or another our local census offices that are using one particular approach or calling out a certain rate more effective than others what we hope to do is both at the national and regional and local level to have more energy rated information near real time to check and monitor progress so that we can deploy resources where they're needed as efficiently as possible address canvassing right we saw the i g report i looked at it and and these and we accept and appreciate what they're doing i think i need to say that publicly because i believe it what we did what we did with that was to act on that information as soon as we could to intervene you asked a slightly different question and that is what can you do at a system level to assure that all the troops at lower levels are doing what they're trained to do in addition to good training we have in place as you know supervisory and  evaluative criteria that if we see workers especially at this very compressed non response follow up stage if we see workers violating the training guidelines we can intervene and terminate them very quickly and we have those management procedures in place hire in such a large group of people that we will do not a simple task it will be quite likely that one of those people is not following at least one of those people is not following training guidelines we can't fully prevent this we can however have management structures in place to intervene as quickly as possible and we do  you are now in the process of opening an additional three hundred forty four local sensors are offices for a total of four hundred ninety four how is that process go pretty good we're on target on signing a lease you know this is a massive operation it's it's just incredible looking at it there are leases involved where we need the partnership with g s a you have to build out these places then you have to you have to get equipment and furniture and all of them and this is this is like a huge logistical operation i thought a clever thing was done on the initial local census offices  as you know one of our subcontractors harris comes and and sub sub computer networks they did a few of the l c s and they sort of stopped and said ok how are we doing what are we doing wrong how could we do this better and slightly and then they're rolling that out for others so so far so good we had a few glitches in a certain areas with leases but those are getting cleaned up so on we're optimistic on this one the  comply with federal legislation associated with f b i background checks is a significant importance to me and i would like to ask you about the bureau's plan to fingerprint  error and rejection i have heard up to forty percent of our fingerprints taken by a trained person they can be rejected causing delays and most importantly the inability to comply with federal legislation governing successful passage of an f b i background investigation has the bureau considered using electronic fingerprinting as an alternate method there was indeed and i could get your report on this if you want an attempt to evaluate the purchase of electronic measurement devices the costs of those  for an effort as massive of the hiring that were going through was judged to be not worth the quality enhancement or the speed enhancement and so in a way the address canvassing operation rejects we were anticipating about thirty percent the actual number was twenty two percent and when we diagnose so why twenty should really put up with twenty two percent can we do better there are people working on improve training for the people taking the fingerprints on this this is two cards two separate cards were taken per person to see if we can get better at that the other part of the cost has to do with f b i processing of these things so we're concerned the f b i handle the big load we're going to have a lot of finger prints going to the f b i processed in a timely fashion in order to be compliant with the law and we're doing a big lo  i think people that work for somebody or work for a corporate group look at the sincerity of the people that are leading them and want to do the same type job so i commend you for that  i want to encourage you to look at letting members of congress do some telling people to fill out your form every every meeting i have now i tell people please fill out your census and they work well enough for that task we trimmed the task a little we took the large blocks and we didn't use the handles for the large box because we knew they were having trouble with a large box i think that the way i'd prefer to think of it the way we use them they worked well well i know that they were used for the p s you know the address and what's the problem if they work well and in the environment that you say there's no way they could have been used to get the responses for these questions people they go out for a non response follow because i know that at least in estimations i believe in the non response follow up if we were able to use these handhelds it would have saved a little over a billion dollars of taxpayer money i see the appeal of the i'm with you on the logic of your question and the disappointing answer i think is that although they were useful for address canvassing the questionnaire use of those things is another software leap and they weren't ready for that and indeed their replanning was motivated by that knowledge  that that programming was stopped they're just not ready for that they're also not the kind of g p s devices that you and i have made it may have been our car right that you know turn left and so on  they allow us to put spots on maps and code those coordinates but they're not really navigational devices in the way that you could imagine being used in non response follow up and then the killer final point is there aren't enough of them even if you know even if those two things were that i just mentioned we don't have enough of these devices to run non response follow if we wanted to so you know it is  today i will focus my remarks on three areas one the significant issues we have identified over the past decade census operations to the problems discussed in our first quarterly report to congress last month and three are ongoing review of the communications campaign and partnership program over the past decade we have found critical shortcomings in such areas as contracting address systems development and hard to count populations these challenges remain to this day our audit of org and contract type field data collection automation resulted in several improvements when the contract was renegotiated this occurred after the well publicized decision to abandon use of handheld computers for non response follow up we have focused considerable attention on address canvassing key to a successful census in our observations nationwide we found essential procedures not followed the bureau quickly directed the field to correct the problem but at that point over half of the operation had been completed quality control is critical to identifying and correcting errors when address list s do not follow procedures while our review is not yet complete we found that quality control employees were unable to make certain address list corrections when needed our first quarterly report to congress examine the bureau the bureau's program management limitations while risk management has improved over census two thousand specific limitations in program management systems and data hamper its ability to plan and manage the census examples include the lack of integrated objective measures of cost schedule in progress unreliable cost estimates and late risk management activities further offenses stopped reporting the risk associated with its hand held computers as a key issue in its monthly status reports to congress the department even though the issue had not been resolved this lack of transparency cast doubt on overall reporting accuracy finally we have been monitoring the bureau's communications campaign including its contract as well as the partnership program while we continue to assess the challenges the bureau's management appears to be going well we have however noted some delays  getting promotional materials to local offices the partnership program is a related component of the communications campaign sensis used one hundred twenty million dollars in recovery act funding to hire an additional two thousand individuals to increase partnerships and hard to count community we will be looking at how well census uses its vastly increased partnership staff in conclusion the bureau is taking positive steps increased the male response rate and participation of hard to count populations with the limitations and its project management systems census faces significant challenges in assessing progress and forecasting cost and schedule overruns for the duration of the descent major areas we intend to watch going forward include the quality of the master address file the use of the communications campaign and partnership staff progress in developing automation for non response follow up on a highly compressed schedule and components of integrated communications campaign for the two thousand and ten census i am joined today by a colleague at draft s c b mark hall but i also want to recognize the contributions of our subcontractor partners without whom this campaign would be impossible to execute a few of them are global hue exposito global he latino i w group allied media and g and g advertising who have all tirelessly worked on behalf of the campaign the topic you requested for today's testimony is criteria for implementation measurement of success from the very beginning of the contract literally all of the activities that the team has been focused around have to do with  successfully the three goals of the campaign and just to remind us they are increasing the overall male response delivering an accurate census and reducing the differential undercount and finally encourage in cooperation with  everything's goals and everything we can everything we have aligned with those goals and everything we continue to do remains aligned absolutely everything we have done is research based our approach to ensuring success has been to listen and learn from others and incorporate that learning into the campaign for example learning from the consumer through very extensive quantitative and qualitative research we've had two phases of communication strategy testing two phases of creative concept testing the census bureau's own segmentation analysis our census barriers that attitudes and motivator studies have all contributed to a vast amount of consumer knowledge and learning from the opinions and knowledge of stakeholders that are big pfizer a committees that have oversight including members of this committee congress senate and the department of commerce learning from analyzing the two thousand census program and its ach learning from the census bureau itself the fresh perspective of new leadership at the bureau as well as field headquarters regions and local offices we've had extensive learning from third party sources and i'll just name a few of the from simmons market research pew research competitor rack and yank a low bitch and learning from the recent academic assessment panel report and its recommendations and finally there's the learning from each other and our own professional experience in developing and implementing integration communications plans so we will continue as a team to do whatever it takes to listen to learn and incorporate into the campaign what we need to make it successful so that when the final comprehensive evaluation of the campaign is done by nork it will be apparent how the campaign has driven the successful achievements of its goals today i'm pleased to report that we remain on track to deliver the campaign to the marketplace in january we are in budget and we thank the government for the infusion of recovery act funds which as the director is outlined has helped in many ways to expand this campaign and make it more pervasive and also we are on track to deliver the very aggressive small business of contracting goals of the contract we have just completed the second and final round of creative concept testing and look forward this fall to final the media buys the print media by the national media by the local media by producing all the creative and giving our stakeholders one additional chance to see work in progress materials and plans before implementation so today we look forward to your questions your observations of advice that you may have about this extraordinary effort and are willing to answer any questions that you may have thank you thank you so much  will thank you mr chairman and thank you all for testifying i'd certainly appreciate it and the overall concerns about the communications effort raised with the bureau  back in july i believe we wrote a letter about the contract and making sure that we have some reasonable congressional oversight over this process i mean it about one hundred seventy five million spent on advertising or communications in two thousand and we're going to have about two hundred sixty two hundred seventy thousand i'm sorry two hundred  sort of two hundred million one hundred million dollar infusion added to that so for the advertising itself the number three twenty or thinks is necessary and proper and will have an effect on lowering non response follow up the need for a non response follow so you know that was my question before i asked about the draft  and the global hue contract and we got back basically a quarter of what you sent back the contract a quarter of it is redacted and we basically have blank sheets of paper here that are just grade out and that's about twenty five percent of what you sent back and it appears based on some of the few words that are we can't even get a document that isn't full sections being redirected would you be willing to work with us to provide us with this information as you know  congressman i believe the cause of the redirect has to do with the proposer labeling as proprietary some of the information within the proposal  working within those constraints we'd be happy to do whenever possible yeah and in your letter back to your reference to freedom of information act which you know means any citizen can can request this information we've actually congress has appropriated the money we're providing oversight and you reference a freedom of information act in multiple places saying that you've already you know you've released this information under the freedom of information act and you're basically forwarding me that that wasn't my request and i can understand certain sections being redacted of proprietary information but not twenty five pages worth of great out material i've seen intelligence reports that aren't this great house and i'm not trying to minimize this i certainly think is important but i'd like to have some cooperation so we can provide some oversight and transparency here be happy to talk to you about that ok i would really appreciate it and i mean you've been shown every sign of willingness to to work with all interested parties and i do appreciate your leadership and i not really here to sort of beat up on yeah on this i just you know would like to have some knowledge beyond what was sent here i mean it's almost laughable the number of reactions we have here and even furthermore you know our committee outlines what we you know what we're requesting as best practices and this is something that the committee puts together  republican or democrat thing but it's documents responsive to the requests should not be destroyed modified removed transfer or otherwise made inaccessible to the subcommittee and you know neither integrity provisions of title forty one nor the trade secrets act of title eighteen section one thousand and five which is part of what you reference prevent congress from receiving proprietary or procurement sensitive information so i think providing us for that information is reasonable additionally draft s c b and global hue and their parent company in a public group have a pretty troublesome legal history global he was accused of over billing the bermuda government one point eight million and among other things it's alleged a global who failed to keep invoices and billing records and charge commissions of up to one hundred eighty one percent on as i think this committee was the process by which the the original contract was followed all of the federal guidelines for acquisition of these kinds of services and there of over billing and enter public was fined twelve million dollars by the f c c for accounting fraud so mr caijing would you like to respond and let me answer your global view question first and then i'll subsequently answer the other questions global as well as all the other sub contractors who are a part of this contract went through a process before we were awarded contract to identify their expertise their willingness to work with us their personnel the backgrounds of their personnel their skill set their financial act human their past experience working on the census campaign which was important for a variety of the subcontractors we took into account a whole number of  factors in putting together our list the other thing to realize is that there were a number of other firms like ourselves who were in the marketplace to team up with other subcontractors at the time so we faced a competitive environment as well as did everybody else in that many of the subcontractors teamed up with other players and therefore were one unwilling to team up with with us or vice versa together as for ourselves just to set the record straight on wal mart there was a solicitation by wal mart it came out of our chicago office we run this out of our new york office and our parent company did a thorough investigation of that and their investigation showed that there was no illegal activities no in proprietary activities on behalf of our company relative to the wal mart contract ok certainly appreciate your dressing that and for i guess the question for you in general some of the stuff that i don't see in the contract one standard part is a media buying fee you know there's certainly a percentage for the purchase of media what is that percentage you're charging actually by contract there is no media commission media is handled percent on a pass through basis so therefore the only cost connected with media buying is the actual labor involved with that making the actual buy but there is no media commission in the  generally speaking a key difference between media and is that in paid media you completely control the message and you control not only the message itself but we are that messages certain channel in the hopes that you do end up with the message expressed the way you'd like the message to be expressed in the channels in which you'd like them to be seen the value of earned media is that it has credibility that paid media does not have with target audiences because earned media is viewed as coming from trusted voices as opposed to paid media where the population knows that the especially those hard population one of the one of the messages or one of the recommendations of the academic assessment panel was to step back and take a look at  the division of spending the allocation of money between paid media and the partnership efforts and as i think many of you know in the recovery act funds there is an increase to the partnership effort a rather sizable increase to the partnership effort resulting from the recovery act spending we do believe that we are reaching the right allocation between partnership support materials which is what our role is in this and the paid media spending even the paid media spending is dramatically skewed toward ethnic populations multicultural populations the hard to count population in fact an order of magnitude there is approximately where we're heading is that roughly twenty percent of the  population speaks another language other than english in terms of their consumption of media but that's actually where close to sixty percent of the dollars are likely to be channeled whereas only forty percent of the dollars are likely to be channeled against the eighty percent of the population that consumes media in english so i think the combination of partnership activities and what is being done in the way the paid media effort is being planned are together surrounding the hard to count is targeted to the ethnic in language in culture hard to count populations and you see that reflected really as a result of the recovery act money the increase in the number of languages in the campaign from fourteen to twenty eight languages those kinds of things have really enabled us to make the kind of change that a lot of our stakeholders were urging us to do early on corrected in the written testimony lined where we are as of today and where we will be shortly by the end of october in terms of delivery of promotional materials and items and when we had the meeting with the inspector general back in april we talked about that deficiency and move very aggressively with our team to get out a lot of promotional materials into the field which we have done to the point where today i believe there are roughly eleven million pieces there are physical pieces plus a lot of pieces that are on the website that people can download so there's a full assortment of  items that are out there in response your question specifically about what caused the delay and what has changed since then i think there are a number of factors one one is that requirements were difficult to get out of the bureau at the time and we went back and forth on requirements setting and i think it landed in a place where it was very clear to us what needed to happen i think our team was not as fast as it could be in addressing some of those requirement changes and i think thirdly the review process that was then in place that has now changed dramatically led to the cycle time where we are today is the bureau has implemented a review process that is much more streamlined they have subject matter experts that are assigned to each batch of materials depending upon what the topic of those materials are and what that has done is make sure that the right content is reviewed by the right person and we get the kind of feedback that we need on a more timely basis so i think we have caught up but we continue to push very aggressively on this front to make sure that  you start with your your last point the monitoring i think dr gross talked a little bit about you know learning about the blogosphere and monitoring their we have in the communications contract a continuous tracking study that has an internet monitoring component to it will be a base way that will be done this fall and then we will have continuous tracking while the campaign is in the marketplace next year one of the recommendations of the academic assessment panel was to take a look at the single unattached mobile segment and ensure that there is more then internet advertising to reach that segment the answer is that is something that we are looking at right now we had in the plan additional things they will be exposed to television they will be exposed to radio they'll be exposed to all the multi media that everybody else has the road tour and all the other elements will reach them the challenge though is that they tend to be on an index basis less exposed to those media than many of their counterparts so one of the things in the replanning that we are looking at is exactly how to fine tune the plan against that group and when we share that with the bureau in october that can be part of what we ultimately share again with stakeholders later on this fall but on the electronic communication with this population clearly we have an opportunity to engage our hundreds of thousands of partner operations because many of them have their own electronic communication with their constituents if you will and so if we can be smart about the content we might prepare actually migrates to their website is what we've added is really a little experimental component to answer an important but only one of the questions that are related to looking forward and how the internet might be used and that is do we as humans react to questions on our web questionnaire in different ways and this is part of a much larger research agenda that's going on around the world there's all sorts of work going on on how you can a web measurement affectively so that people answer as carefully and as well as they can that's the focus of this particular test but looking forward i think it's safe to say and i think  this is a unanimous opinion in the field that we can't imagine a twenty twenty census without and then they're not component this is actually i think it's very easy judgment to make a harder judgment that all of these new gizmos we have will be old fashioned by two thousand and twenty and the wisdom that we all require i think is choosing a course of planning and cycle testing so that we have  use of an internet in two thousand and twenty that is the optimal use of that internet of twenty twenty this is hard i think we have a wonderful vehicle at the census bureau now the american community survey which could indeed be used more or less as the space shuttle as years to to add on little experiments throughout the decade to inquire when a new gizmo is created within the internet is that going to be useful for us to measure the american society one way or the other and if we're good about this we can choose the right role of the internet one one thing that i think is important to note  the findings of survey methodological research around the world on internet use are not particularly really wonderful in terms of whether the response rate increases greatly with and then or not option it is the biggest disappointment in my profession right now we had great hopes that if i offered you an internet option versus a paper questionnaire go immediately to the internet option people are not behaving the way we thought this is a problem for us so require the measurement of certain attributes of the population in order to read funds every question in the roughly sixty nine question questionnaire has a law setting behind it that you and your colleagues have passed and that is the tool that allows us to administer those laws allow different agencies to administer those laws now it has one other benefit and that is for small business owners for a small town  mayor they were cheated in a way in past census designs they had wonderfully rich data once every ten years but only once every ten years and now we're supplying those towns and those decision makers at very small levels of geography more up to date information this is a london full grand new thing that the society's going to get it's going to require a lo lot of education of local people on how to use it wisely we have a big education task ahead of us but once it gets soaks into the society this is a wonderful thing for all of us all right thank you for touching on that there's been some discussion debate about the need for it and i certainly agree with you that it is preferable to the long form i think it's just experience in terms of the