In a little over a year, the Census Bureau will be conducting the decennial survey of all Americans that’s mandated by the Constitution.

And already there are personnel problems with the once-a-decade survey.

The Commerce Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) — which has oversight — criticized the census in a recent report for allowing people to conduct surveys who might not have been qualified.

It’s the same old thing at Census.

Readers might remember that the Census Bureau is one of my favorite topics. Years ago, a whistleblower told me that census field operators were cheating on surveys, particularly the ones for the unemployment rate that are done by the US Labor Department.

Instead of actually going up to peoples’ homes, knocking on doors and questioning occupants, the surveyors were filling in the answers themselves. This cheating even had a name inside the Census Bureau — “curbstoning.”

What that means is that they sat on a curb and filled out the surveys themselves.

That compromised the validity of the nation’s unemployment rate that’s published monthly.

There were congressional investigations and hearings, and things were supposed to change — although I doubt they did since my whistleblower was punished for her conscientious efforts. (She’s now suing the government and hopefully she’ll collect big.)

The data collection for the Labor Department and other government agencies is small stuff compared to the decennial census, which is estimated to cost $15.6 billion to complete and will take a year.

That cost is 27% higher than the estimate that was given in 2015. And it will be substantially above the $13 billion that the 2010 count cost.

And that’s with so-called money-saving efforts that are being used in 2020.

One of those money savers is having more work done in the office rather than in the field. For instance, census workers will be using high-tech research on Google Maps and other methods to determine which streets haven’t changed since the last census and which areas of the country are not occupied.

The census workers then won’t have to send people to those areas.

Tests of these new methods were recently conducted in Providence, RI, some West Virginia counties and in Pierce County, Wash. It was in Providence that problems were found.

The OIG said it was “unsure” of whether nearly 10% of the so-called “listers” — field surveyors — were qualified for their jobs.

It didn’t determine that the 26 “listers” were unqualified. The OIG just said it couldn’t determine that they were qualified because no supervisor testing had taken place.

The OIG’s office said Census allowed these 26 listers to work anyway.

There were other problems, as can be expected, in a test like this. But the key takeaway in the OIG report is this: “The [Census] Bureau took a nationally representative sample of 18,500 blocks [streets] and found that errors in passive blocks [ones that hadn’t changed] could result in 1.4 missed households in the decennial census and 3.4 million households left on the address list.”

A passive block is one in which the people working in the office determined through Google Maps and other sources that there didn’t seem to be a change since the last count.

“Moreover, the Bureau does not know which populations or regions will be most affected by the missed households in the passive blocks,” the OIG report said.

The 2020 census report, which will be out in 2021, will be used to determine what areas of the country get what amount of federal tax dollars. It will be also used to determine representation in the House of Representatives.

If nearly 10% of the workers in this one test of the Census Bureau’s cost-saving moves couldn’t be trusted, what happens when the surveying goes full scale next spring?

It’s going to be a mess. I’m all in favor of following the Constitution, but in this day and age, there must be a better and cheaper way to find out about who is living in America than through mail-in surveys and knocks on doors.