WASHINGTON -- The Census Bureau has already received 2.4 million completed questionnaires, agency director Kenneth Prewitt said Tuesday, urging Americans to fill out and send back the rest of the forms.
Census forms should be arriving at 120 million homes this week, and the early returns represent about 2 percent of the total."So we have 98 percent to go," Prewitt observed.
The national head count is required by the Constitution every 10 years and most households are expected to reply by mail, though people can also respond by e-mail or phone. Census workers will visit those who fail to do so, as well as families in some rural areas.
Americans have flooded a helpline set up to assist people in filling out their forms, he said. The helpline -- 1-800-471-9424 -- handled 636,000 calls on Monday.
Prewitt said he had already done his own form via the Internet. By logging on to www.census.gov, people can get questions answered and can file short forms electronically.
The count's original purpose was to allocate House of Representatives seats appropriately among the states. Today, the figures also help determine how billions of federal dollars are spent, making an accurate count vital to local communities.
Most families will receive a basic short form with few questions, while one in six homes will get a long form seeking more detail to establish a statistical profile of the nation.
Prewitt stressed that any information provided on the forms is confidential and cannot be obtained by any other government agency or private individual.
Confidentiality is of particular concern to illegal immigrants, census officials acknowledge. To combat that the Immigration and Naturalization Service this week outlined revised guidelines it hopes will boost census response rates.
"While the service will continue to enforce the immigration laws during the census period, steps will be taken to avoid adverse effects on census participation," Michael Pearson, INS executive associate commissioner said in a memo to regional directors.
"The willingness of illegal aliens to participate in Census 2000 depends much on their confidence that INS will not be able to access the information collected," Pearson said.
While some critics called for a moratorium on INS activities, "we are pleased that the guidance significantly and clearly limits enforcement activities during this critical period," said Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.
Besides English, census forms are available in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
In addition, written guides to filling out the form are available in nearly 50 languages.