Did anyone else receive one of these? According to their web site, US Code Title 13, sections Section 141 and Section 193 your response is required by law.
In reality, those sections outline that The Secretary (who is presumably defined elsewhere) can take surveys as a part of their census process. It is Section 221 that requires you to respond:
Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey provided…
That’s just a crock.
Oh, sure, census information is useful and all that. It’s just the principal of it. I guess I’ll have to ask the nice lady who came to my door for some evidence that she is an authorized officer or employee of the Deparment of Commerce, or a bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of The Secretary.
Heck, I’d pay the $100 if it weren’t for Title 18, Section 3571 (allegedly Section 3559 as well, but that seems to deal with imprisonment and not monetary fines). With it on the books, the “not greater than $100” fine becomes “not greater than $5000” fine. That really blows.
Comments
718 responses to “American Community Survey”
I have not yet received this dreaded form. And there’s no way in a very hot place I’ll ever answer the majority of the questions. I have NO problem answering the questions from the 1910 or 1920 Census, so that’s all the information they’ll get from me. To wit:
Street Address
Surname & First Names of all residents of the household.
Gender & Age and place of birth/nationality.
Language spoken in the home.
Occupation (general category) & educational level as well as
Whether or not our home is owned or rented.
Anything more than that is unnecessary. My great grandparents answered those questions as immigrants and so I’ve got no problem following in their footsteps.
HOWEVER, if someone dares trespass on my property, I’ll be calling the police to have them forcibly removed. Either that or I’ll shoot them myself.
You may have out-stubborned them or they may have got tired of expending resources on you. They can’t just keep a person posted on you. Budget over-runs and the huge cost of the perpetual Survey are it’s most potent enemies, not us poor citizens. The politics of the federal budget may put an end to the ACS after several years and more outraged citizens, if the ACS isn’t efficient and quiet.
I was reading a faily thick report of their own on line and buried in it was a discussion of voluntary vs mandatory survey. Voluntary is much cheaper but the response goes down by 20%. So that is why it will stay ‘mandatory’ until someone spanks them about the money spent.
But what is most likely is that they have gathered enough info by observation that they can count your case as a success. Stay alert until your 90 days are up.
Theres been a lull. No phone calls, no visits for the past 5 days.
I hope that was that. Not sure if its just a tactic to get us to let our guard down and surprise us with another barrage of visits.
These last 3 months have trained us enough now that we don’t take any unknown calls. Which also means the telemarketers are not having much luck connecting with us to offer their very desirable services either. So be it.
Keeping my fingers crossed.
joe
Sigh! They have moved to the stalking phase. They come and wait for someone to show up. We have avoided making contact yet. 2 visits yesterday, the first one at around 12:30 PM, waiting in the car and driving around the house for about 30 minutes. 2nd visit at 8:45pm.
Have managed to avoid speaking with the agent so far. This is not over. I think it will intensify. They will wait to catch someone from the household coming in or leaving the house.
joe
Yes, 2 visits yesterday, one at 5:40pm, the other (supervisor) at 8:50pm.
Have never received so much love from the government.
Good read.
https://www.checkpointusa.org/Census/Census.htm
As the time progresses towards the end of the month, expect more frequent phone calls or rep visits. Everything ramps up before either the next phase begins or the whole cycle ends. I found it amusing to dodge all the contacts. I had most of my rep visits at the end, including some twice per day.
The CB agent came by for the 2nd time now. Nobody answered. She left behind an envelope, some information about the kind of wonderful work CB does the “other 9 years” – lying again – they are going to send these babies out on a rolling basis right?
Scrawled URGENT in big bold letters on the envelope. I shredded it.
I hope this ends by end of this month…
joe
When I received the ACS, I wrote to all sorts of media people. The only response I got was from World Net Daily, which has about 5-6 articles on the subject. I thought this would be a great story. There were some stories which had been removed from some newspaper sites. Later I discoverd (in the CB material) that there is a “rapid response team” which is sent out to squash any unfavorable stories in the media. The CB conducts workshops for media types to feed them data for the stories that are printed. You know, those stories which talk about states with the highest income, most number of college graduates, number of unwed mothers, etc… Remember, we are on our own in the search for the truth. The CB has spent lots of time and money to study our attitudes towards surveys and to develop methods to get around our resistance to providing private info.
I was wondering about writing to some new orgs to ask if they are aware of this survey and the draconian attitude of the CB. While trying that, I saw that companies like CNN will accept emails under their Privacy laws, and those pretty much say that any information you provide (email address, name, phone…) is basically up for sharing as they see fit. So contacting these organizations could be potentially more damaging than it might be worth.
I am just hoping that the CB does not demand email addresses from the moderators of this blog!
joe