Massive census waste found in audit
Published 10:17 pm Tuesday, February 16, 2010
WASHINGTON — Were those pricey Super Bowl ads a waste? Maybe not, but paying $3 million to census employees who didn’t do any work surely was.
The Census Bureau, a month away from its 2010 population count, has already wasted millions of dollars paying temporary employees who never did the work and others who overbilled for travel, according to excerpts of an audit obtained by the Associated Press.
Seattle is among census regional offices that had mileage costs exceeding its planned budget, according to the audit.
On a positive note, federal investigators said it was appropriate for the Census Bureau to spend $133 million on its ad campaign, including $2.5 million for Super Bowl spots that some Republicans derided as wasteful.
But the report by Commerce Department inspector general Todd Zinser makes clear the government is at risk of wasting millions of additional dollars without tighter spending controls by the Census Bureau on its 1 million temporary workers.
“The costs were substantial,” he wrote, imploring the agency to improve cost estimates so the national head count does not exceed its $15 billion price tag.
In response, Census Bureau spokesman Stephen Buckner attributed the excessive training costs to strong applicant interest in the temporary jobs. As a result, more recruits than expected showed up for the paid training sessions, and many subsequently were let go without performing work.
Since then, the agency has adjusted its job recruitment to account for the changes and imposed new controls to manage census-taker training and travel expenses, Buckner said.
The bureau is “confident we have better estimates and cost controls in place,” he said.
Most people will receive census forms in mid-March, and the Census Bureau is asking residents to return them by April. For those who fail to respond, the government will dispatch about 700,000 temporary workers to visit homes in May.
Among the audit findings:
Another 5,000 employees collected $300 for the same training but worked a single day or less. Cost: $1.5 million.
Twenty-three temporary census employees were paid for car mileage at 55 cents a mile, even though the number of miles they reported driving per hour exceeded the number of hours they actually worked.
Another 581 employees who spent the majority of their time driving instead of conducting field work also received full mileage reimbursements, which investigators called questionable.
Other temporary employees claimed nearly 3.9 million miles driven at the mileage reimbursement rate of 58.5 cents per mile, even though the federal rate had been reduced to 55 cents as of January 2009. The result: excess payments of roughly $136,000.
