The head of the Census Bureau said Friday he has ordered a review of the government’s efforts to protect the identity of individuals after researchers discovered months ago that years of publicly available data on the elderly contain numerous errors due to the government’s use of “masking” techniques.

Robert M. Groves, director of the bureau, said that the programming mistake responsible for the bad data had been corrected going forward, and that it would not affect the 2010 Census. Groves said he is considering a rerelease of the affected statistics, dating from 2000 to 2005.

The review comes as census forms are about to be mailed to every home in the country. A House subcommittee hearing Wednesday will look at how the census is promoting itself in hard-to-count areas, usually poor, immigrant and minority locales.

Errors involving statistics on people 65 and older were found in data typically used by researchers in academia, government and marketing.

via Washingtonpost.com.

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