The Bureau has less than two years until Census Day. To ensure a successful census, sound risk management will be crucial, particularly given its scope, magnitude, and immutable deadlines of the census. The size of the decennial operation means that small problems can magnify quickly, and big problems could be overwhelming. For example, 60 seconds might seem like an inconsequential amount of time, but in 2000, if enumerators had spent just 1 minute more at each household during nonresponse follow-up, almost $10 million would have been added to the cost of the census. Further, sound risk management is important to a successful census because many risks are interrelated, and a shortcoming in one operation could cause other operations to spiral downward. For instance, a low mail response rate would drive up the follow-up workload, which in turn would increase staffing needs and costs. Of course, the reverse is also true, where a success in one operation could positively affect downstream operations. Nevertheless, rigorous up-front planning and testing, as well as risk mitigation plans, are the best ways to stave off problems. Finally, the census is conducted against a backdrop of immutable deadlines; the census’ elaborate chain of interrelated pre- and post-Census Day activities is predicated upon those dates. To meet legally mandated reporting requirements, including delivery of population counts to the President on December 31, 2010, census activities need to take place at specific times and in the proper sequence. On May 8, 2008 the Bureau issued its plans for conducting the 2010 Census paper-based nonresponse follow-up operation outlining key operational decisions. Among these is the need to develop an information system to manage the workload for a paper-based nonresponse follow-up operation and for additional field infrastructure, such as more telephones and computers to support this operation, to restructure the replacement mailing and the removal of late mail returns from the nonresponse follow- up workload, as well as the need for cognitive testing of the enumerator questionnaire used to collect data from nonrespondents. The contractor carrying out the FDCA program will develop the operations control system, which is designed to manage field operations that rely on paper as well as those that rely upon the handheld computers. The Bureau is particularly concerned about this system because when it was tested as part of earlier dress rehearsal operations—for example, during group quarters validation—it was found to be unreliable. As a result, the workload for these operations had to be supplemented with additional paper-based efforts by local census office staff, instead of electronically as intended. The operations control system is critical because it is intended to provide managers with essential real-time information such as enumerator productivity and the status of workload such as interviews conducted and remaining. Bureau officials said that the manual workaround was manageable for the dress rehearsal with just two local census offices; however, such a manual workaround would be nearly impossible to do when operations are carried out nationwide next year. Officials said that they expect to review computer screen shots of the operations control system reports it will use to manage the nonresponse follow-up operation in January 2009; however, the Bureau has not yet determined when and how testing of the operations control system before nonresponse follow-up, which begins in April 2010, will occur. The Bureau will be using newly developed systems for integrating responses and managing nonresponse follow-up workload that have not yet been fully tested in a census-like environment. The Bureau’s contract for the Decennial Response Integration System, designed to help identify households that have not yet returned census forms and to collect the results from enumerators conducting nonresponse follow-up interviews, will process each mail return and enumerator questionnaire and transmit to the FDCA program the number of questionnaires received. In turn, FDCA will manage the nonresponse follow-up workload, in part by removing initial late mail returns from the list of housing units requiring follow-up visits. Consequently, depending on time and cost considerations, Bureau officials believe that the Bureau must conduct, at a minimum, a small scale simulation of the integration and communication between the Decennial Response Integration System and FDCA for such aspects as load testing for a paper-based operation, and interfaces such as when the paper is processed by the Decennial Response Integration System and when the check-in status is transmitted to individual local census offices through management reports processed by the FDCA program. When or how these tests will be completed is not clear. The Bureau’s plans for nonresponse follow-up will also require changes in local census office infrastructure. The Bureau expects it will need additional hardware, including printing and scanning equipment, computers, and telephones. Further, the Bureau expects to scale the FDCA network to support a system for keying in large volumes of data related to hiring and payroll for over 700,000 field workers it plans to hire for the nonresponse follow-up operation. Previously, the Bureau expected to maintain field worker time reporting using the handheld computer. Also, the Bureau expected to hire fewer field workers. The Bureau’s redesign has also changed the replacement mailing strategy which will be used in 2010. The replacement mailing is a second mailing sent to nonresponding households. Testing has shown that a second mailing increases the overall response rate and reduces costs by increasing the number of returns that come in by mail, decreasing the need for census field workers to collect census data in person. Prior to the redesign, the Bureau planned to send second mailings to all nonresponding households that initially received the census form in the mail. However these plans changed, in part because, according to the Bureau, without using handheld computers for nonresponse follow-up, it would not be able to dynamically remove late mail returns—including those resulting from the replacement mailing—from the enumerator assignments on a daily basis. The Bureau had to devise a way to balance the time available to print replacement questionnaires with the time available to remove late mail returns from the paper-based nonresponse follow-up workload. The Bureau now plans a multi-part approach. First, it will send approximately 25-30 million blanket replacement mailings to census tracts with low response rates, based on historical response rate data from 1990 and 2000 Census and the American Community Survey. As a result, all housing units in these selected census tracts would receive a second census form, regardless of whether or not they returned the initial form. Similarly, the Bureau plans to target a second mailing to an additional 15 million households in census tracts that are in the middle-range of mail response rates. Finally, the Bureau will not send a replacement mailing to households located in census tracts that previously had high mail response rates. This combination “blanket” and “targeted” mailing strategy is a new approach that will not be tested prior to the 2010 Census. If the replacement mailing does not function as planned, this strategy could confuse respondents in the blanket mailing areas and result in multiple responses from the same household that return both forms. It is instructive to consider that the Bureau’s previous experience with a blanket second “replacement” questionnaire sent to all housing units located in the 1998 dress rehearsal sites caused a significant number of households with multiple responses. As a result, the replacement mailing was dropped from the 2000 Census design because the Bureau was concerned that it would have been overwhelming to process multiple census responses during the actual census. Moreover, without the benefit of implementing nonresponse follow-up during the dress rehearsal, the Bureau will not know how well its new system for removal of late mail returns will work. While the Bureau encourages respondents to mail back their census forms quickly, some are not returned until the middle of April or later, after the nonresponse follow-up operation has begun. To reduce the cost of nonresponse follow- up and to minimize respondent burden, it is beneficial to the Bureau to remove these late mail returns from the nonresponse follow-up universe. Because nonresponse follow-up will be paper-based rather than conducted with handheld computers, the Bureau will remove late mail returns with the FDCA program prior to April 20 and manually thereafter; however, the recent Bureau plans provide only timelines for removing late mail returns and the Bureau has not yet finalized the workload estimates or how it will manage this work. Not having an opportunity to rehearse its strategy for removing late mail returns makes difficult any estimate of resulting workload. In addition, Bureau officials said that it will be important to conduct cognitive testing of the questionnaire used by enumerators for nonresponse follow-up. With the change from using handheld computers, a paper questionnaire will be used by census enumerators in the 2010 nonresponse follow-up when making personal visits to housing units to collect census data. When developing this questionnaire, the Bureau plans to draw upon its extensive research and testing of interviewer-conducted questionnaires developed for other censuses and surveys as well as lessons learned in Census 2000. According to its May 8, 2008 plans for conducting the paper-based nonresponse follow-up, the Bureau will conduct this cognitive and usability testing in early summer 2008 and the testing will address both respondent interactions and ease of use for the census enumerators. The Bureau expects the questionnaire will have space for up to six people as in Census 2000 and will link other household members to the address via a continuation form; include coverage questions; meet the Decennial Response Integration System data capture specifications; and collect data on the outcome of the enumeration. Not being able to test the paper-based nonresponse follow-up in the 2008 Dress Rehearsal introduces risk because the dress rehearsal will no longer be a dry-run of the decennial census. While the Bureau has carried out a paper-based follow-up operation in the past, there are now new procedures and system interfaces that, as a result of its exclusion from the dress rehearsal, will not be tested under census-like conditions. We discussed the nonresponse follow-up plan with Bureau officials and they acknowledge the importance of testing new and changed activities of nonresponse follow-up as well as system interfaces to reduce risk.