Issa Steps In to Probe Census Fraud Claims

House Republicans have launched an investigation into "shocking" allegations that sharp declines in unemployment figures released just before the 2012 presidential election may be indicative of widespread and systematic fraud taking place throughout the U.S. Census Bureau.

The probe came about after New York Post columnist John Crudele wrote about Census employee Julius Buckmon, who told Crudele that his boss directed him to fabricate people and information to meet survey quotas for the Philadelphia region. 

Buckmon was just the tip of the iceberg, according to an anonymous Crudele source, who acknowledged that other employees did the same thing. 

Buckmon left the agency in August 2011, according to Business Insider, which quotes a Census spokesman saying, "The agency has no reason to believe this isn't an isolated incident" by an employee "willfully disobeying Census procedures and disobeying the law."

Crudele also raised questions about Census hiring thousands of temporary workers to conduct surveys and then letting them go only to later hire them back. Each "hiring," he writes, showed up as a created job and when the employee was let go, the person did not qualify for unemployment and never showed up as someone who had lost his or her job.

Former Census field manager Ron Brochu told Crudele that during the 2010 census he witnessed "operations that strongly suggest the Census Bureau manipulated nationwide hiring of tens of thousands of temporary workers to manipulate employment data in 2008 and 2009."

Via: Newsmax

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