If investigators do want to speak with any of the Census sources who have now come forward, I am insisting that the workers be protected under federal whistle-blower laws.

The OIG, Oversight Committee and several others are looking into the operation of Census since I broke the Buckmon story.

The corruption Crudele has uncovered is disheartening, as is the response of the bureaucrats who are covering their posteriors.

There’s a pattern of falsifying statistics throughout the entire Census Bureau. And anyone who attempts to blow the whistle on the fraud is either retaliated against or ignored, according to two new sources who have experienced the process firsthand.

As I’ve been writing for more than six months, the Census Bureau office in Philadelphia uncovered a case of fraud in 2010, did nothing about it and allowed the practice to continue.

In that instance, a data collector named Julius Buckmon was faking reports that went into the nation’s all-important jobless tally and consumer-inflation survey.

Because the Census Bureau’s surveys are scientific — meaning each answer, in the case of the jobless survey, carries the weight of about 5,000 households — Buckmon’s actions alone would have given inaccurate readings on the economic health of 500,000 families. (snip)

Now others who work at Census in different areas of the country are stepping forward to tell me similar stories about data being changed at the whim of supervisors who are more concerned about making quotas than protecting the integrity of information that is used for everything from cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients, monetary policy decisions by the Federal Reserve and business plans by companies in the US.

“I can tell you that waste, falsification and fraud are rampant,” says one of my new sources, who works as a Census supervisor in the Midwest and handles a number of surveys, including those on jobs, health and crime.

When this source complained, higher-ups “told me to shut my mouth.” When that didn’t happen, the source was deprived of work.

Says another source who works for Census in the North Central part of the country: “I’ve said more than once (to superiors), ‘You have to watch; they are falsifying data.’ It goes nowhere. I am thoroughly disgusted with it.”