Census training 1: Formalisms
Apr. 5th, 2010 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursangnomeSaga continued from a previous post.
I am now an official part-time employee of the Federal government, as they called me in for Census Crew Leader Training a week early.
I was called in early, because someone's actually got some brains. Normally, they would (and did) send out census forms in mid-March, follow up with another round of forms to non-responsive addresses in April, and then send someone to knock on doors in May. But in the towns of my area around Boston, there are tens of thousands of students who don't live in campus housing. These students will be leaving the area in May, and may not get counted if the Census Bureau waits. So, they've called up a bunch of us early to start work on these most time-critical areas.
Now, despite that seeming intelligence, we are still talking about a Federal agency here. So, the first day was largely about completing the paperwork to get us to be employees. I don't have the list in front of me, but I think it was something like 16 forms to fill out, and a few other informational pieces. A couple of them seem, to my eye (uneducated on the final uses of the forms) to seem kinda... dumb. Like a form that's certifying that I have read a particular piece on Personally Identifying Information confidentiality and security - which I had to print my name, sign, and date. Twice. On the same piece of paper. On the same side of that piece, with no extra information between that I might be certifying on. Odd form design, there.
The payroll system is, in my humble opinion, wasteful to the point of being daft. Each worker must hand in a separate time sheet for each day of work, and they have to hand them in daily - no stacking them up for a few days and then handing them in. There are going to be something like 1500 of these sheets each day for our one local office alone, and we're covering just three suburban towns. This is a process that is begging to be made paperless - and it seems to be that it could be done with a web-app with a very simple work flow.
And now, somewhere in the central office, there's a paper with a study in black and white of my fingerprints. In the past, the Bureau did name-checks on employees, but now they're going so far as a fingerprint check to help make sure they aren't sending violent criminals out from door to door with an official Census Bureau badge to talk to people. The implication is that the Census Bureau is not keeping them long-term, but is simply checking to see if they match anything the FBI has currently on file, but I haven't asked what the final disposition of that data is. My only other comment there is that fingerprinting is messy.
During the next couple of days, I get to learn the job of the Census Enumerators - these are the folks who actually knock on doors and answer questions. I'm not going to be performing this function myself (much), but I do have to train my crew in the operation.
I've one other observation to make - the Census Bureau seems to take its obligations on privacy seriously. Today, I had to take an oath to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. As far as my job is concerned, that includes people who want to get at PII (Personally Identifying Information). There are those who are paranoid that the census information will be misused by the Immigration Service, or the FBI, or the like. At my level, there's certainly no sign that any abuse of information will be at all tolerated.
I am now an official part-time employee of the Federal government, as they called me in for Census Crew Leader Training a week early.
I was called in early, because someone's actually got some brains. Normally, they would (and did) send out census forms in mid-March, follow up with another round of forms to non-responsive addresses in April, and then send someone to knock on doors in May. But in the towns of my area around Boston, there are tens of thousands of students who don't live in campus housing. These students will be leaving the area in May, and may not get counted if the Census Bureau waits. So, they've called up a bunch of us early to start work on these most time-critical areas.
Now, despite that seeming intelligence, we are still talking about a Federal agency here. So, the first day was largely about completing the paperwork to get us to be employees. I don't have the list in front of me, but I think it was something like 16 forms to fill out, and a few other informational pieces. A couple of them seem, to my eye (uneducated on the final uses of the forms) to seem kinda... dumb. Like a form that's certifying that I have read a particular piece on Personally Identifying Information confidentiality and security - which I had to print my name, sign, and date. Twice. On the same piece of paper. On the same side of that piece, with no extra information between that I might be certifying on. Odd form design, there.
The payroll system is, in my humble opinion, wasteful to the point of being daft. Each worker must hand in a separate time sheet for each day of work, and they have to hand them in daily - no stacking them up for a few days and then handing them in. There are going to be something like 1500 of these sheets each day for our one local office alone, and we're covering just three suburban towns. This is a process that is begging to be made paperless - and it seems to be that it could be done with a web-app with a very simple work flow.
And now, somewhere in the central office, there's a paper with a study in black and white of my fingerprints. In the past, the Bureau did name-checks on employees, but now they're going so far as a fingerprint check to help make sure they aren't sending violent criminals out from door to door with an official Census Bureau badge to talk to people. The implication is that the Census Bureau is not keeping them long-term, but is simply checking to see if they match anything the FBI has currently on file, but I haven't asked what the final disposition of that data is. My only other comment there is that fingerprinting is messy.
During the next couple of days, I get to learn the job of the Census Enumerators - these are the folks who actually knock on doors and answer questions. I'm not going to be performing this function myself (much), but I do have to train my crew in the operation.
I've one other observation to make - the Census Bureau seems to take its obligations on privacy seriously. Today, I had to take an oath to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. As far as my job is concerned, that includes people who want to get at PII (Personally Identifying Information). There are those who are paranoid that the census information will be misused by the Immigration Service, or the FBI, or the like. At my level, there's certainly no sign that any abuse of information will be at all tolerated.
