Once again our little village gets caught between two parts of the government. The Census people tell us participation is mandatory, but our post office returned all of the forms. A little known fact is that not all physical addresses in the U.S. receive mail. Some places, like our village, do not deliver but require post office boxes. Apparently other parts of our government do not realize this, as many of them insist on mailing only to a physical address. This is what happened to *all* of the census forms for our village. The Census mailed the forms to our street addresses, and the post office sent them all back. Trying to do my part, I just called the Census number to request a form. I couldn't request one. To do so, I need to have the barcode number from the form I didn't receive. I think I'll wait until someone arrives at the door. Tom
<AHEM>Sounds like the postmaster needs to get whacked by a 'clue by four.' The post office has a complaint form just for such occasions. . . . Then you have to somehow get it mailed . . . Are you in one of those anti-government, militia, Michigan areas? ... Tell me the postmaster isn't one of them! Bob Wilson
I am bemused why you think a deficiency of your Post Office is the Census Department's fault? Remember, if you are advocating giant government databases, the IRS still should not share.
This database already exists. This is not a deficiency of our local Post Office, but part of the operational policy of the USPS. They set the rules that prevent our local P.O. from delivering to buildings in the village. The Census Department elected to use the USPS to deliver forms; they should work within the addressing requirements of the USPS. They wouldn't try to mail forms without cities and zip codes. Why mail them to undeliverable addresses? In the end, though, I do blame the USPS. If I lived in the country, they could find my house, and drive the form out for free. Live in town and use a box, and they can't map my physical address to my P.O. Box. It's silly. The USPS database of valid addresses can be a real pain for us. Sometimes when I try to order something from the Internet, the site uses the USPS address database and tells me my address doesn't exist. Some of the software will refuse to accept the order. Tom
It is very likely the census bureau does not have your PO Box; they only have your physical address. Since information sharing between the census and other government agencies is extremely limited, it is possible they can't even share the information with USPS in order to get you PO Box address. Yes, yes my head is spining now too.
I'm in the same boat as Tom. The Census bureau will not mail the forms to a PO Box. I checked with our local post office and they have not received forms from Census. I'll wait for the knock on the door also.
The post office can mark any address to be un-deliverable at their discretion, for example, the address has a barking dog, the mail box is not at the correct location like within a certain feet of the curb side and so on, so on. The Census will not know about this as they only send mail every ten years.
Amazing! And ridiculous that these agencies can't get it right. I'm sure the same situation comes up every 10 years with millions of addresses. Haven't they learned? Just curious - how does your county tax auditor know where to mail your property tax bill? There must be a database that links your physical address with your post office box. It wouldn't be too hard for the census bureau to mine that information. Or the Postal Service, for that matter. In today's age, those envelopes should be able to get to every residence. How did you even find out that the census bureau attempted to send the envelope to your physical address? Was it a local news story? Did your post office leave you a little "love note" in your PO box?
What I hated is that the government wasted money sending me a letter saying I would be getting a census in the mail soon. Then I got the census. Then I got another letter saying thanks for filling out the census or if I did not fill out the census I better fill it out. Same thing goes for my tax return. I get a letter saying I will be getting my tax return soon and a day or a week later I get the check. Its like I'm going to send you a letter telling you that I will be sending you a letter soon. Big waste of money.
Yes for the tax bill. All of the local and state governmental agencies include both our physical address and our mailing address. The Feds are the only ones who seem to insist on only using the physical address. As for knowing, our postmaster showed us the boxes of census forms. He said he was sending them all back as undeliverable, since none of them had P.O. Box numbers. Tom
Last name first, first name last, and middle initial at the end. C'mon, Tom, you're not grasping the logic here. No form, no address...obviously you don't exist, so why worry? That's what I like about direct deposit. By the time you get the letter, the money's already in your account.
Such a subversive rebel, that postmaster. I bet he could match most of the names with the numbers without straining any grey cells. Or, he could have just left the pile on the counter, with a note somewhere obvious telling people to pick up their census form. Heck, he probably knows most residents well enough he could have filled out the damn forms himself. By skewing the income data, the whole town could have qualified for massive government aid.
The existence of such databases does not imply that specific government agencies have the right to use them. Many of these databases are in unregulated private hands, where some agencies (e.g. law enforcement) can use them, and some others are forbidden to do so. My hometown postmaster didn't need an address, or even an accurate name, to deliver items. He even quizzed myself and siblings for a clue about a builder who shared our surname but did not live locally, and was very pleased that we had seen the name on a truck and knew to which town he could forward it. But he is long retired, and it seems unlikely that the current postmaster could go to such great lengths in possible violation of agency policy.
Our old postmaster was like that too. Mail would come in with only a name and city and it would get delivered without any trouble. Most of the mail now gets sorted before it even arrives at our little post office. Even if it does get here, our new postmaster is enough of a bureaucrat to send it back rather than deal with an incomplete address. Tom
