Better Strategy Is Needed for Managing the Nations's Master Address File

摘要

The 2000 Decennial Census enumerates the U.S. population and housing as of April 1, 2000. This evaluation focuses on the Master Address File (MAF), which supplies addresses used to support operations responsible for mailing out questionnaires, enumerating nonresponding households, and controlling the collection and tabulation of population data. The quality of MAF addresses directly affects the accuracy, completeness, and cost of the decennial. In the 1990 decennial, one-third of persons missed were not counted because address data for their housing units was missing from the address file. Also, the General Accounting Office reported in the 1990 decennial that the bureau spent $317 million on operations to identify 4.8 million nonexistent housing units and 8.6 million vacant housing units and to remove the former from the address file. To address questions raised regarding how well programs to create the MAF for Census 2000 were working and what its quality would be at the start of the decennial, the bureau decided in 1997 to reengineer the MAF-building strategy. The objectives of our evaluation were to (1) determine if steps taken to improve the MAF before delivery of the address file worked as planned, (2) assess steps taken to identify and correct MAF data quality problems as the decennial progressed, (3) determine whether the software development approach ensured high quality data, and (4) evaluate whether the data quality standard for the MAF provides a meaningful benchmark for decision-makers. This evaluation focuses on city-style addresses, which comprise over 80 percent of the nations residential addresses. The bureau estimated through demographic methods that as of July 1998, there were 112.5 million housing units nationwide.