Abstract

One of the U.S. Census Bureau’s innovations in the 2020 U.S. Census was the use of administrative records to create household rosters for enumerating some addresses when a self-response was not available but high-quality ARs were. The goal was to reduce the cost of fieldwork during the Nonresponse Followup operation (NRFU).

The original plan had NRFU beginning in mid-May and continuing through late July 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the delay of NRFU and caused the Internal Revenue Service to postpone the income tax filing deadline, resulting in an interruption in the delivery of administrative records to the U.S. Census Bureau. The delays were not anticipated when U.S. Census Bureau staff conducted the research on administrative record enumeration with the 2010 Census data in preparation for the 2020 Census or during the fine tuning of plans for using administrative records during the 2018 End-to-End Census Test. These circumstances raised questions about whether the quality of the administrative record household rosters was high enough for use in enumeration.

To aid in investigating the concern about the quality of the administrative record rosters, our analyses compared administrative record rosters to self-response rosters and NRFU household member responses at addresses where both administrative records and a self-response were available.