Census job creation: 10,000 surveys redone because of fakery

Two Census Bureau managers from a Brooklyn field office were fired after their bosses found they faked household surveys to meet deadlines, the Daily News learned.

Instead of pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, the corner-cutting people-counters mined the phone book and Internet to make up answers to questionnaires, regional director Tony Farthing said.

The managers - turned in by whistleblower employees - were caught last week. Now, at least 10,000 surveys need to be done or redone, officials said.

Census officials in Washington only admitted to a string of incomplete forms and poor tracking in disclosing the firings Friday afternoon. But Farthing corroborated worker accounts to the Daily News that managers Alvin Aviles and Sonya Merritt began dummying up responses in the final crush to finish the surveys, which field workers are supposed to compile from in-person household visits.

"Basically, people were being asked to forge [questionnaires]," said one worker in the North East Brooklyn office, which covers 95,000 households.

"We went in and did a full investigation," Farthing said. "We found out two managers on the weekend of the 12th of June cheated by using phone books or Internet sources."

A worker told the Daily News that when field interviewers returned to the office with blank forms, Aviles also enlisted some of them in the scheme. "He had people fill them in," the worker said.

Aviles and Merritt could not immediately be reached for comment.

Farthing said he believes the branch's earlier work is kosher, but the pair decided to break the rules at crunch time when they were looking at a huge stack of unfinished surveys, and their bosses were pushing for results, even if it meant more night work.

"We were telling them to go back on all non-interviews and hit this stuff hard. None of this 9-to-5 stuff, go when they know someone will be home," Farthing said. It was then, Farthing said, that the managers "came up with the bright idea, or not-so-bright idea" - to save time.

The Census bureau was not able to estimate how much it will cost to redo all the work, but a spokesman said it was not an issue because the bureau was under budget on the massive project. Farthing said the honest workers left in the office are redoing 5,000 or so interviews that may be tainted.

Labor unions, friendly politicians produce rich public pensions

... meet Hugo Tassone, a Yonkers police officer who retired three years ago at age 44 earning a salary of $74,000 a year. Now receiving an annual pension of $101,333, he raised the amount to that sum by working scads of overtime in his last year on the job, it's reported.

That's legal, and he defends himself in a front-page, New York Times story by saying that a cop's work is difficult, that he took on those duties knowing he could retire after 20 years and that inflation will eat into the large amount as he gets older.

Fair enough from his perspective, but hardly fair to taxpayers in a state that now boasts 3,700 retired public employees with annual pensions paying in excess of $100,000, according to the Times. Wait a minute, though. The left coast beats that.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece of some months back notes that in California, where public pension costs have increased by an amazing 2,000 percent over the past decade, there are some 15,000 retired public employees taking in more than $100,000. Other interesting information relayed in the article by Steven Greenhut of the Pacific Research Institute: Some categories of workers can retire at 50 with 90 percent of the final year's pay on a pension that is inflation-adjusted. And the state's unfunded pension liability was put at $63.5 billion in a 2008 report.

We've talked about the right and left coasts. The middle is not in such good shape, either. According to an investigation by newspapers in Ohio referred to by a Boston Globe columnist, governments in that state are forking out $4.1 billion a year in pensions that have been increasing by $700 million a year. Total unfunded pension liabilities in the country are in the trillions and governments have no way of paying for them without exorbitant tax increases. It's largely the work of the enemy within.

Last year, it was widely noted, public sector unions pulled off a stunner, gathering in more union members than the total in the much larger private sector. More than a third of all public employees are now union members, compared to the private percentage of 7.2. Abetted of course by irresponsible office holders often eager for their political support, these public sector unions have done far more to indulge their members than helping to concoct pensions of a kind hard to locate in private employment.

Read assessments of what's going on, and you discover that the wages and benefits of federal employees in eight out of 10 occupations examined by USA Today are considerably higher than for the same occupations in the private sector.