BY SamuelGoldsmith and Jake Pearson In New York and Michael Mcauliff In Washington
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Two Census Bureau managers from a Brooklyn
field office were fired after their bosses found they faked household
surveys to meet deadlines, the Daily News learned.

Instead of pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, the corner-cutting
people-counters mined the phone book and Internet to make up answers to
questionnaires, regional director Tony Farthingsaid.

The managers - turned in by whistleblower employees - were caught last week. Now, at least 10,000 surveys need to be done or redone, officials said.

Census officials in Washington
only admitted to a string of incomplete forms and poor tracking in
disclosing the firings Friday afternoon. But Farthing corroborated
worker accounts to the Daily News that managers Alvin Aviles and Sonya Merritt
began dummying up responses in the final crush to finish the surveys,
which field workers are supposed to compile from in-person household visits.

"Basically, people were being asked to forge [questionnaires]," said one worker in the North East Brooklyn office, which covers 95,000 households.

"We went in and did a full investigation," Farthing said. "We found out two managers on the weekend
of the 12th of June cheated by using phone books or Internet sources."

A worker told the Daily News that when field interviewers returned to the
office with blank forms, Aviles also enlisted some of them in the
scheme. "He had people fill them in," the worker said.

Aviles and Merritt could not immediately be reached for comment.

Farthing said he believes the branch's earlier work is kosher, but the pair
decided to break the rules at crunch time when they were looking at a
huge stack of unfinished

surveys, and their bosses were pushing for results, even if it meant more night work.

"We were telling them to go back on all non-interviews and hit this stuff hard. None of this 9-to-5 stuff, go
when they know someone will be home," Farthing said. It was then,
Farthing said, that the managers "came up with the bright idea, or
not-so-bright idea" - to save time.

The Census bureau was not able to estimate how much it will cost to redo all the work, but a spokesman
said it was not an issue because the bureau was under budget on the
massive project. Farthing said the honest workers left in the office are
redoing 5,000 or so interviews that may be tainted.

"We're not happy about what happened," he said, noting that Aviles and Merritt were
turned in by the very people they trained.