All census forms collected ahead of schedule

All census forms collected ahead of schedule

A week before a self-imposed deadline for collecting completed census questionnaires, Commerce Secretary William Daley Thursday announced the Census Bureau had accounted for each of the 120 million households to which a form was sent, the Associated Press reported.

Census officials are now shifting their focus to follow up visits to 12 million addresses in an effort to ensure the quality of responses they received. They are also in the midst of conducting a separate, random sample survey of 314,000 households, from which they will statistically adjust numbers from the actual head count.

About 80 million or 66 percent of census forms were mailed back, while census takers finished enumerating the remaining 40 million households.