“It’s kind of a shock seeing that email from the Census Bureau just so long after the fact,” says Alex Almeida of Phoenix, who received notices in September, close to a year after ending a clerk job at a local census office in November 2020. “It was very upsetting in a way, like this is the thanks we get for all our efforts.”
“We determined that 147,619 employees owed substantially less than what it would cost to collect the debt from them,” said the bureau, which did not answer NPR’s questions about the total amount of money the bureau has decided to stop trying to collect and how it’s covering those costs.
