ORLANDO, Fla. – Almost 300 people working for the U.S. Census Bureau last year had “major" issues with their background checks and a lack of vetting oversight could pose risk to the public and the agency as it hires and deploys hundreds of thousands of census takers for the 2020 census, according to a watchdog report released last week.
About 70 of the workers deemed to have “major" issues were in the field last fall, verifying addresses ahead of the once-a-decade head count of the U.S.
More than a dozen other workers with some kind of derogatory information in their background checks had access to Census Bureau facilities and information systems, and they included employees working in positions deemed “critical" and “high risk," according