Census chief says all sides at fault for handheld problems

A "combination of events" is to blame for much-publicized problems with the Census Bureau's plan to use handheld computers for its 2010 decennial count, agency director Steven Murdock said during an interview with Nextgov on Tuesday.

"I think there were issues on all sides" with Harris Corp.'s contract to provide the handhelds, Murdock said. "Certainly, we could have specified some of the requirements more thoroughly. At the same time, there were problems in functioning of the technology."

Census awarded the company a $595 million contract for the handhelds in March 2006. Harris was to provide handhelds for enumerators to go door-to-door counting households that did not return their census forms. But the project encountered repeated delays and cost overruns and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez announced in April that Census would revert to traditional paper forms.

The agency still plans to use Harris' handhelds for verifying mailing addresses and has tapped the company for field office support technology, but disagreements over the project's price tag have emerged. Harris' estimate of $988 million exceeded that of the nonprofit government contractor MITRE Corp. by more than $300 million.

Congress has given Census a deadline of Aug. 15 to report a final figure. Murdock said the bureau would be able to provide some preliminary numbers at that time. He predicted that the bureau would have contract terms and other plans for 2010 put in very specific terms by the end of September.

Murdock declined to comment on the specifics of the ongoing negotiations with Harris, but left open the possibility that the bureau would assume greater responsibility or seek additional help from other companies. Murdock added that he was not aware of any considerations that would result in replacing Harris with another contractor.

"We are in the process of negotiating that…that process involves both discerning what parts will be left with the contractor and what parts … we will assume either directly or with the help of additional expertise," he said. "We're on schedule, we're making good progress on that, and it's been a very cooperative relationship between us and the contractor."

Murdock, who was confirmed in December, said he did not want to dwell on past problems, but he noted that the situation highlighted the complexity of having contractors learn the bureau's processes. He also outlined steps the agency has taken to improve its IT project management, including appointing former chief information officer Arnold Jackson as leader of the handheld program and embedding IT specialists from MITRE on project teams.

"We've intensified the management structure and made changes in leadership," Murdock said. "We've made a number of changes to tighten up management and improved our ability to evaluate where we are."

One consequence of the late decision to revert to paper forms is Census will be unable to test portions of its paper-based follow-up procedures. Murdock said the bureau is confident in its ability to conduct a paper-based follow-up because it has done so many times before, but acknowledged that "in an ideal world, everything would have happened in a time frame that we would be able to test all of that."

In addition, Census still is finalizing plans to fingerprint and run background checks on the more than 500,000 enumerators who will take part in the 2010 count. The bureau is unsure about the costs of that program, as officials have yet to decide who will take the fingerprints, but Murdock said the FBI will be assisting in the process and has been very cooperative.

One final issue that Murdock addressed was the possibility of allowing households to respond to the 2010 count via the Internet. That had been part of a contract Census awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. to integrate response methods, but was later removed.

"We are looking at that…but we are not diverting resources from the decennial to do this assessment," he said. "We have not made a decision about whether or not we will use the Internet, but we won't employ any strategy where we can't ensure the confidentiality of data or that endangers the goals of the census."