Census Threatens People To Get The Information That Should Be Protected.

Another reason people don’t trust the government: Census uses legal threats to force survey response

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Ben Bullard

If you’re among the Americans who’ve received the U.S. Census Bureau’s supplemental American Community Survey (ACS) in the mail, you may have noticed that your response to the lengthy questionnaire is, uh, mandatory.

That’s because the Census Bureau is having trouble convincing people to trust the government with answers to personal questionsabout how much money they make and what their property is worth.

Instead of employing positive reinforcement to entice people to respond to the 30-page document, the Census Bureau opts to “favor the ‘stick’ above [the] ‘carrot’ when mailing out questionnaires,” as Reason’s J.D. Tucille puts it.

The Bureau’s Tasha Boone, the survey’s assistant division chief, outlined some of the challenges ACS faces in a recent presentation to the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations. She lamented in the accompanying document that the public’s “[p]erception of ‘irrelevant’ or unnecessary questions raises concerns about privacy” and that “[d]istrust of government is pervasive.”

“Just a thought, but a bit of self-awareness might be lacking in the preference she expressed,” wrote Tucille, “…for the existing [survey mailout] that threatens in bold, capital letters, ‘YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW.’

“That should settle those privacy and trust issues.”

The ACS survey goes far beyond the basic decennial census, probingU.S. residents for information about their jobs, their healthcare, their property, their transportation and even their marital history.

The ACS survey has encountered strong opposition from constitutionalists who maintain the government simply has no business collecting highly personal information about people who reside in the U.S.

The Rutherford Institute slammed the survey in a 2012 letter to the Commerce Department, demanding that the questionnaire beoverhauled so that it asks “only questions on subjects covered by the census itself.”

The group also urged Commerce to stop threatening people with $5,000 fines for neglecting to comply.