Evans/AP

Census Bureau managers Alvin Aviles and Sonya Merritt are accused of researching phone books and Internet to fake answers on surveys to meet deadline.

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 Farthing said.

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.

I ran into a random census worker in Manhattan, she had the bag with the logo.  I said, they’re closing out Brooklyn, as far as I’ve been told.

Not so in Manhattan!  But, I thought Bk was the worst- nationally!  Shouldn’t we be finishing last?  I kind of wanted Brooklyn to be the worst, somehow, a sardonic claim to fame.

Was thinking yesterday, being a census worker is like being a social worker, or a quitting smoking adviser, or a diet coach, or an addiction counselor.  The neighbor, the client, the smoker, the victim, the addict, needs to be convinced that they are giving up info, resigning to give up afflictions, for the sake of their own good.  If they do it for themselves, for their own districts’ good, then they are on easy street.  But the ones with suspicion, lack of trust, paranoia, even uncalled for anger, are more difficult to convince.  There’s a mental game going on, on each door step.  Understandably, lack of trust is natural in our criminal world of identity theft, just as it is when living in an unhealthy or dysfunctional environment.  Yet, in the job of the enumerator, you have to trust, to trust that the info is confidential and that it will be treated right, otherwise how could you do the job convincingly?  Fortunately there is ‘hope’ for more than 50% of clients, or maybe those are the ones just more easily brainwashed!

-a busy bee worker, signing off.

So, a day or two ago, Mr. Blow It Out Your Arse actually called me and apologized!  This after he called the office to learn that I was doing my job, too good of a job he said and he finally gave me the little info that I’d tried to get in the first place.

I saw one of my official Notice Of Visit notes today, still taped to a door from yesterday and there was a long missive on it about why you should give this info- this written by a neighbor who claimed to be “drunken”.  I had to take it down because it looked as if I had written it and if you didn’t read it carefully you’d have thought I was the one who was “drunken”.  A guy happened to be coming in to the building and he said, “Oh I thought you wrote that!”

I heard the word from Swedish FOS today that tomorrow was my last day, and everyone’s last day.  They actually haven’t finished enumerating Brooklyn, but I think they either just gave up or ran out of money or both.  Since Brooklyn is one of the worst Census takers nationally, I repeat, nationally!, why finish the job? it’ll just mean giving Bk more money.  My Crew Leader, I call her ‘Ayla’ left me a message saying the same thing about tomorrow being the last day so it must be true- one more day of door bell ringing, mostly useless buttons with frayed wiring.  The pressing the pressing, the Itouch for Luddites, touched a million times by delivery people, UPS folks, pizza boxers- that’s every few weeks, snow shovelers- that’s every winter, and census takers- that’s every decade.  So old fashioned.  At least it feels like you’re doing something, standing in a random doorway, expectantly pushing something.

Some kids said that they thought I was going door to door asking for money.  They said they assumed that, why else would anyone be going door to door?

One gal laughed at me as she saw me again while returning from the corner store.  Oh how embarrassing, still looking for the inhabitant of 3R?  Ha ha, good luck on that!

Oh by the way, I’m running out of generic clothes to wear.  If it’s a t-shirt, it has to not say anything provocative, nothing offensive, better yet, not say anything at all, otherwise strangers will use it as fodder for conversation outside the federal boundary.

I really feel like I’m beginning to know some people now, as some are repeat offenders, or just repeats that have begun to have character traits or have sisters now or housemates or dogs, all recognizable.  It the real thing, oh dear, it’s the REAL facebook!

I feel confident that in ten years they will do this all online, I’m already feeling nostalgic for the streets!  Maybe beat cops will just be replaced by drone robots with billy clubs and guns?  The multiple camera system is already in place.

The weather finally broke and it was cooler today.