Census Takers Starting To Go Door-to-Door

4/30/2010

The U.S. Census Bureau says census takers begin going door to door, tomorrow, to follow up with households that either didn’t mail back their form or didn’t receive one. The bureau is offering tips for those who receive a knock on the door from a census taker.

The census taker must present an ID badge that contains a Department of Commerce watermark and expiration date. The census taker may also be carrying a black canvass bag with a Census Bureau logo. The census taker will provide supervisor contact information and the local census office phone number for verification, if asked. The census taker will only ask questions that appear on the 2010 Census form.

The census taker will not ask for social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers and will never solicit for donations or contact anyone by e-mail. In most cases, census workers will make up to six attempts at each address to count possible residents. This includes leaving notifications of the attempted visit at the house or apartment door, in addition to trying to reach the household by phone to conduct the interview or schedule an in-person interview. The bureau says, after exhausting their efforts to do an in-person interview with a resident of an occupied housing unit, they will seek out proxy sources, such as a neighbor, a rental agent, a building manager or some other knowledgeable person familiar with the housing unit to obtain as much basic information about the occupants as they can.

Some households will receive a visit, even though they may have mailed back their form. If the form arrived too late to be processed before nonresponse follow-up packets were sent to census offices, the household occupants must still be interviewed when the census taker arrives.

Households that didn’t receive a form by mail, including those that pick up their mail from post office boxes, will be visited by census workers as part of the follow-up plan. The Census Bureau doesn’t mail forms to post office boxes, because responses must be associated with a specific residence location, not the post office box location.