Big worries for the nation’s first high-tech census should have been obvious when the door-to-door head counters couldn’t figure out their fancy new hand-held computers.
Now, officials say, technology problems could add as much as $2 billion to the cost of the 2010 census and jeopardize the accuracy of the nation’s most important survey.
A congressional agency says the census is at “high risk” of producing an expensive yet unreliable count, and lawmakers are planning hearings.
At more than $11 billion, the initial cost of the 2010 census already was the most expensive ever. Officials are scrambling to hold down costs while trying to ensure the count produces reliable population numbers — figures that will be used to apportion seats in Congress and divvy up more than $300 billion a year in federal and state funding.
This was to be the first truly high-tech count in the nation’s history, with census-takers using hand-held computers to track and tally the millions of Americans who do not return the census forms mailed out by the government.
