The U.S. Census Bureau Geography Division Lacks Complete Information for Project Costs and Has Not Fully Monitored GSS-I Goals

This report addresses the status of the Census Bureau’s (the Bureau’s) 2020 decennial program preparation and planning efforts. The Bureau maintains all known living quarters in the Master Address File (MAF). Each address in the MAF is linked to a geographic location in the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing database (TIGER), to create the MAF/TIGER database (MTdb). Our audit objectives were to (1) assess the methods and costs of continuously updating the MTdb; (2) determine how efforts, such as the 2015 Address Validation Test, support the accuracy of the MAF; and (3) evaluate the preparation of the Local Update of Census Addresses (LUCA) program for the 2020 decennial census. This report focuses on risks identified for objective 1. A report on objectives 2 and 3 was released on February 23, 2016.