Census fraud in NY's 10th Congressional District

By Sam Foster
Via Fox News

The redistricting is coming to your state next year and seeing how polarized the political atmosphere has become, expect to see foul called more than once on this year's census.  Fox News gives us a first taste in what will surely be a soup of fraud stories in relation to the census.  It just so happens that today's example is out of NY's 10^th congressional district.

The U.S. Census Bureau is reviewing 10,000 questionnaires after two managers in a New York field officeallegedly forged household interviews in an attempt to meet a deadline -- the latest incident of alleged census fraud that has prompted at least two federal lawmakers to call for an investigation.

The two managers, who allegedly cheated by copying information from phone books and Internet directories, were turned in by colleagues and fired last week. The alleged fraud occurred in a census office in Brooklyn, N.Y., that oversees 165,000 housing units.

"They were essentially trying to complete forms that were not completed in their entirety by using other sources of data," Census spokesman Stephen Buckner said in an interview Thursday with FoxNews.com.

The Brooklyn office is now reviewing the 10,000 forms -- the bulk of the work completed by the office in a two-week period -- but does not know precisely how many questionnaires were forged.

"We have no signs that it would be that many," Buckner said.

Buckner referred to the latest case of alleged fraud as an "isolated incident" and said various "quality control measures" are in place to ensure accuracy in conducting the nation's official head count.

But the scandal is the latest blow to a Census Bureau already hit by previous allegations of over-billing and mismanagement -- leaving some wondering how the agency plans to prevent such incidents from happening again.

According to a governmentaudit released last February, thousands of workers hired in 2009 were trained and paid without ever having worked for the bureau. The Commerce Department's inspector general report also found that several temporary workers overbilled the agency for travel expenses. And on June 2, a temporary worker based in Louisiana used a hidden camera to reveal several cases of alleged wrongdoing by other workers at the bureau, including falsifying the number of hours worked.