Government Survey Worker Visited My House

Today, Saturday July 16th, I opened the door for a kind looking elder lady. She was dressed in a polo shirt, golf shorts, and had an official looking badge around her neck. We do not get a lot of surprise knocks on our door so as soon as i saw the lady I felt a bit relieved that is was not some hoodlum selling crap and let her speak.

She asked me if I got some government Health and Services survey in the mail last week and I did not remember since I was on vacation and got a boatload of mail upon my return. Most of the mail was crap and was thrown away. Anyway she seemed a bit unnerved that I did not complete this government survey.

Then I asked her to repeat who she was working for because I became a bit nervous that I was somehow being scammed. She repeated that she was working for the federal government. She then began to ask questions about if I owned my home, how many people lived there, if there was an apartment, etc. Noticed that she had a blackberry or palm type device with my home address.

I then told her that I answered those questions for the Cencus, I fill out my Tax Returns with that kind of information, and I was suprised why she was asking that. She stated that she needed the basic infromation and if selected I would be asked to fill out a Health and Services survey.

At this point I realized that I am not required to answer such questions and probably was a little pissed that the government had this information but was wasting my tax dollars for a pork barrel project. I kindly stated that I have answered all questions required by law throught the Cencus and Tax Returns and care not to answer any questions.

She seemed stunnded despite that fact that I was relatively kind and non threateneing with my responses. In my 36 years of life I have never seen a Federal Government Survey taker on my doorstep. A bit odd that they would not collect information from existing sources or even via phone. What a waste of my tax dollars. Does anyone think I was scammed or is there a good reason for the governmental intrusion?

Do I think it was a good reason for government intrusion? Hardly.

You did great. I doubt I would have been so civil, just out of curiosity. "Who are you"? I would have said... Who knows what they were up to. Thanks for the heads up, though...

Originally posted by theebdk
She seemed stunnded despite that fact that I was relatively kind and non threateneing with my responses. In my 36 years of life I have never seen a Federal Government Survey taker on my doorstep. A bit odd that they would not collect information from existing sources or even via phone. What a waste of my tax dollars. Does anyone think I was scammed or is there a good reason for the governmental intrusion?

I'm 53 and never had your experience. The Federal Government probably knows more about you than you do. That does not mean that money won't be wasted trying to get somebody to get the info from you anyway. Are you on some kind of WATCH LIST, I mean besides being a member of ATS?
Out of curiosity, did she offer any Identification showing even Temporary employment with whatever Federal Agency she said she worked for? She might have been honest, but depending on your answers, you might have been getting prepared for a burglary from her co-horts.
Here are a couple points to consider based on experiences of some people that I know.
Why not contact your Local Police and ask if this is legitimate or a scam? Do you have any idea what kind of information she may have already had about you? Was she asking generic questions, or pointed ones that she wanted you to confirm? You might try contacting a Credit Bureau to verify your status. No point finding out too late that you were a victim of ID Theft.

If you threw away the survey it's why she was sent. The government is about the last business on earth that requires a near total universe in it's sampling in order to do it's job adequately. The reason is it's business is people. Not an invasion of privacy, but representation. If you refused to answer, you cost your county, town or state federal funds. Local municipalities are in competition for the same ever shrinking monies since nobody thinks they should pay taxes anymore, and that's why they 'wasted' that money on a "pork barrel project" to try and represent you.

S'ok. Some other town will get that cop or schoolteacher or road.

[edit on 16-7-2005 by RANT]

Do you live in Southern California?

This very same thing happened to me several weeks ago. In my case though, I did answer her questions, and she gave me her card and asked me to call her in a week to invite her back to ask the same exact questions to see if the responses had changed.

Yes...I was a bit confused at that too, and after some debate, finally convinced her to just come back whever she was ready. She did, asked the same questions, got the same answers, and I haven't seen her since.

The whole thing struck me as "odd" but not dangerously so...just sort of a "Hmm...why send someone to the door? Why not just mail out forms?" I also remember noticing that the questions seemed inadequete. She asked for number of members of household, and wanted ages for everyone, and was especially interested in employment, but she never asked anything about ethnicity, education, nationality, or anything else I would have expected the census bureau to be interested in.

Hmmmmmmmmm. Perhaps the government, in anticipation of the coming takeover, (alien, NWO, foreign power), is trying to decide who to enslave, and who to exterminate, given the concentration of the poll-takers interest on employment. GOOD GOD, I'm a loan officer, what function could I possibly have?

All kidding aside, I would have demanded to know more info from HER. (i.e., EXACT department she worked for, purpose for the survey, uses for the info, etc.)

Majestic
Count yourslelf lucky you haven't already been replaced by software. Most people in your position have been.

I think it's silly to use people to do these census jobs, it seems like a waste. I suppose it's good to employ people, but it's unnecessary, and we're facing too great an across-the-board deficit to be screwing around with cash.

Just my opinion.

To me that just doens't make any sense. In LordBucket's case why would the lady ask to be invited back to see if the answers were the same. Why if it were a simple census would a Federal Gov employee come back to the same person to see if his/hers answers would change?

Today, Saturday July 16th, I opened the door for a kind looking elder lady. She was dressed in a polo shirt, golf shorts, and had an official looking badge around her neck. We do not get a lot of surprise knocks on our door so as soon as i saw the lady I felt a bit relieved that is was not some hoodlum selling crap and let her speak.

And this is exactly why they sent a nice little old lady because people will respond to her and are less likely to shut the door in her face or feel threatened.

A bit odd that they would not collect information from existing sources or even via phone. What a waste of my tax dollars. Does anyone think I was scammed or is there a good reason for the governmental intrusion?

I agree here. Always in my experience it has been via mail and occasionally a phone call.
Theedbk - did your little lady ask to come back to verify if your answers were going to be the same?

Perhaps the government, in anticipation of the coming takeover, (alien, NWO, foreign power), is trying to decide who to enslave, and who to exterminate, given the concentration of the poll-takers interest on employment

Or else they released some sort of mind control in a controlled population to test it's effectiveness and the reason she wanted to come back to see if LordBucket's answers were the same was because they were testing to see if it worked.

Woo hoo!

She came back again.

This was her third visit now (she said fourth, but I may not have been here for one of them) to confirm. She basically just asked "everything the same?" I said yes, and she thanked me and was ready to leave.

BUT!

Instead I spoke to her, asked for another card, etc. So here are some details from the conversation, and my inferences from it:

She claimed that the census bureau doesn't have enuogh money to survey absolutely everyone, so they randomly pick a number of houses and extrapolate the rest from them. By re-visting the same houses, they can get an idea of thing like how often people move without actually havine to ask, and she said it is also useful to know, for instance, the difference between someone who is unemployed for a long time, and someone who has been laid off one visit, but is working again in the next.

They have a variety of different "types" of questionnaires. She described the one we were doing (number and age of people and employment) as being one of the easy ones. She described another, in which people were asked to give a complete list of all monthly expenditures, breaking down costs of rrent, insurance, mortgages, food etc. She gave a curious explanation of this...saying that by knowing cost of living in an area, and by knowing how quickly it rises, the powers that be are better able to make adjustments for things. (Sadly, I did not ask the manner in which they do they this.)

She didn't bring her card to the door, so we went out to her car, and she asked me to hold her latop. It was a fairly beaten up Dell laptop, running what appeared to be a dos database program by the name of "CPS 2000." All text, "CPS 2000" at the top left, a longer description across the top, several names ina list down the length of the screen. Very minimalist looking program.

Here is the information from the card: (I am omitting her name and number to her direct line.)

US Census Bureau
Helping you make informed decisions

Los Angeles Regional Office
15350 Sherman Way, Suite 300
Van Nuys, CA 91406
Phone: (800) 992-3530

The logo is of a shield inside three concentric circles. The shield bears, from top to bottom, an open book, a little splotch that sort of resembles a genie's lamp with some "glint" lines, and a pair of cross feathers. The first circle contains what looks like a laurel wreath, or possibly leaves, surrounding the shield. The second circle contains the expressions "US DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE" and "BUREAU OF THE CENSUS" as well as two stars, which separate the two expressions. The third circle is filled in, and contains a string of dots. (Stars? Hard to tell, it's small.)

I've looked around, just briefly, at www.census.gov... but I don't see the logo anyplace.

She mentioned that if I wanted to call the number to make she that she was legitimite, I would get an automated system that handled a bunch of things, and that to get to the portion of the system that was relavant to her survey, to choose the option on the menu for "CPS" which I think she said stood for "Current Population Survey."


In any case...while I've no way of knowing what exactly is being done with the information, I wasn't left with the impression that there was anything nefarious about it.

strange that they woould send someone round. Id suggest it might be because either a) the information is going to be used for something relatively important and they want to ensure it is collected as accurate as possible or b) the information is being collected in a different way to avoid certain offical restrictions or regulations on data, so it may be being used by a suspitious parts of government that prefer secrecy whenever possible.
Those would be my instant suspitions

Hmmm...

Maybe you are a member of a group that is involved in a secret government biological experiment....

She has stop be multi-times to see if you are still alive....

If thats was a dig, i didnt necesaraly mean anything exotic.
Maybe something to do with accounting or economics.
Measuring inflation, possibly because they know full well that they are fudging the figures so some guys inside want to get the real inflation or unemployment rate, but it could be so many different things its impossible to say.
If you have ever studied psychology you might understand how all sorts of crazy conspiracies go on with questionaires, becaue to make sure the results are not biased in any way often you have to not let the person know what is really being recorded.