Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.

The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.

Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.

Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.

Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.

“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.

Census, under contract from the Labor Department, conducts the household survey used to tabulate the unemployment rate.
Interviews with some 60,000 household go into each month’s jobless number, which currently stands at 7.3 percent. Since this is considered a scientific poll, each one of the households interviewed represents 5,000 homes in the US.

Buckmon, it turns out, was a very ambitious employee. He conducted three times as many household interviews as his peers, my source said.

By making up survey results — and, essentially, creating people out of thin air and giving them jobs — Buckmon’s actions could have lowered the jobless rate.

Buckmon said he filled out surveys for people he couldn’t reach by phone or who didn’t answer their doors.

But, Buckmon says, he was never told how to answer the questions about whether these nonexistent people were employed or not, looking for work, or have given up.

But people who know how the survey works say that simply by creating people and filling out surveys in their name would boost the number of folks reported as employed.

Census never publicly disclosed the falsification. Nor did it inform Labor that its data was tainted.

“Yes, absolutely they should have told us,” said a Labor spokesman. “It would be normal procedure to notify us if there is a problem with data collection.”

Census appears to have looked into only a handful of instances of falsification by Buckmon, although more than a dozen instances were reported, according to internal documents.

In one document from the probe, Program Coordinator Joal Crosby was ask in 2010, “Why was the suspected … possible data falsification on all (underscored) other survey work for which data falsification was suspected not investigated by the region?”
On one document seen by The Post, Crosby hand-wrote the answer: “Unable to determine why an investigation was not done for CPS,” or the Current Population Survey — the official name for the unemployment report.

With regard to the Consumer Expenditure survey, only four instances of falsification were looked into, while 14 were reported.

I’ve been suspicious of the Census Bureau for a long time.

During the 2010 Census report — an enormous and costly survey of the entire country that goes on for a full year — I suspected (and wrote in a number of columns) that Census was inexplicably hiring and firing temporary workers.

I suspected that this turnover of employees was being done purposely to boost the number of new jobs being report each month. (The Labor Department does not use the Census Bureau for its other monthly survey of new jobs — commonly referred to as the Establishment Survey.)

Last week I offered to give all the information I have, including names, dates and charges to Labor’s inspector general.

I’m waiting to hear back from Labor.

I hope the next stop will be Congress, since manipulation of data like this not only gives voters the wrong impression of the economy but also leads lawmakers, the Federal Reserve and companies to make uninformed decisions.

To cite just one instance, the Fed is targeting the curtailment of its so-called quantitative easing money-printing/bond-buying fiasco to the unemployment rate for which Census provided the false information.

So falsifying this would, in essence, have dire consequences for the country.

This is a serious question that I've had for a while. The way I understand it, when the Fed wants to start selling Treasury securites (or print money, if you will), there's an exclusive number of banks (primary dealers) that get the privilege to deal directly with the Fed. When you look at the list of primary dealers, it's the usual suspects of the largest financial institutions. My question is this: what makes these institutions so special in that they are the only ones that get to deal directly with the Fed?

2.) The underutilized "industrial capacity" may not be capable of producing goods that provide a value to society regardless of profit.



I would assume he would argue, and I would agree if he did, that the work these jobs produce is probably providing a value to society. I guess this also depends on what constitutes 'value'. Most of the shit we buy now is of dubious value. We buy it because it's there, or because we're convinced it would be good for us if we did. I'm not sure why that couldn't continue.




that's possible, although many of the unemployed HAD skills that were potentially useful at one point. And it's not like service jobs require advanced degrees. And what skills these people have are likely to atrophy while they are out of work. I'd argue that while some jobs are better than others, employment is just a flat investment in human beings.



As long as we deem that work is necessary to be able to access the resources necessary for survival work becomes a positive good in itself.

There's a larger question underneath some of your points that is probably worth its own thread, which is whether or not we need to rethink the nature of the relationship between work and access to resources as we just need fewer workers to staff the 'viable' industries.

I think you are overhyping the 'knowledge based economy' a bit

basically a family tree sprouted off of Goldman..

Tell that to everyone in Arlington and San Francisco. It's not that we necessarily need the elements of the knowledge-based economy, we don't need the Internet and cell phones and farming robots, but we can become dependent on them (and for the most part we have), and that gives them incredible power over us.

I would suggest that Arlington and San Francisco flatter themselves when they consider themselves a template for the rest of the country

We may be talking past each other here. Do we both agree that the knowledge based economy is overhyped as the next necessary phase of economic evolution, which is to say that it's power and influence reflects economic and political strength (which can be contested) more than something that is ontologically inevitable?

Here's a couple of articles that hint at the issue:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/silicon-chasm_768037.html?page=1

this assumes the 267 million Americans decide they want to go along with this charming state of affairs. We'll see if that kind of economy can retain any functional legitimacy and if it is compatible with the sort of repressive police state it will require.

Why do you think it will require a repressive police state? Hell, the masses are already going along with it. You don't notice because your kids are too young, you belong to the 15% and teach kids who hope to belong to the 15%. When succeeding takes a very refined skill set, you don't need a repressive police state. People drop out, lose interest and give up all on their own.

The Occupy Wall Street rallies were possibly a last gasp attempt for quite a while. When you're representing the 85%, there's going to be too many nut cases to ever have a unified, cohesive message. That played against the political capital and $ of the 15%, well it's going to take something special.

Every time I see the thread heading I get the same thought, "Not the President, not Congress, not the Senate."

I think OWS was actually the first act in what is going to become a much larger phenomena. So do people in power (political and economic). They're terrified of it. And much of the security apparatus this country has built is being retooled to protect elites from class war


I teach at a working class college. The kind of school the community college kids go to to finish their degree. I am not teaching the 15% (nor am I in it. I make 67,000 a year. With the excessive overtime I put in, which causes hardships for my family, I clock in at 78%. My wife works too, with her salary we make it up to 85% nationally, but we live in a very expensive area) . I am teaching the students who are doing everything society tells them to do and are becoming aware of the fact that they will not be rewarded for doing so. And what you are describing is precisely the stuff I do teach and research (class, power, resistance, legitimacy, alienation, exploitation, the relationship between economic and political power, and how the way we think about that relationship helps determine how we can respond to it). People may just give up and drop out on their own. The best kind of power is the power you can get people to internalize. It's cheap and effective. But it can only be maintained as long as people believe the status quo has legitimacy, and that legitimacy is declining rapidly. Then it will be protected through overt violence. And what happens after that we'll have to see.