Be warned: mistakes on census forms can't be corrected or updated

Saturday, 4 March 2023

Stats NZ has been hoping this year’s census would prove its most valuable, after bugbears in 2018 and 2013.

Nelson dentist Ben Simmons says Stats NZ should have made it clear up front that people wouldn’t be able to edit, update or correct any responses they made filling out the census online.

That is especially as Stats NZ has asked people to fill out the electronic form ahead of “census day” on Tuesday, when they might have unexpected guests or not be where they expected to be on the day, he said.

Simmons said his family wanted to edit their census responses after his wife filled in the form for herself and their children, putting in her iwi affiliations and thinking she could update it with her husband’s iwi affiliations later.

“She never thought twice about it.

“Now my iwi are short of two humans, which isn’t world-ending exactly, but very annoying – especially as we did actually care about trying to do it as properly and accurately as we could.”

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Simmonds believed Stats NZ should have made clear the point at which responses could not be edited, given that it was normally possible for people to click all the way back through other types of online forms and amend answers.

“I suspect a number of people would 'pre-fill' portions of the survey in the same manner that they would for many online surveys, most of which allow the user to save it part way and come back to it.

“Our suggestion would be a ‘review/confirmation/warning’ page before it goes irreversible, like on the Inland Revenue’s website.”

The fact people were being asked to fill out the census days in advance compounded the issue and could reduce people’s confidence in the $251 million stats-gathering exercise, he believed.

“You're supposed to know who's going to be in your house on that Tuesday, but people can make last minute plans and that can change.

“While it's not statistically important for infrastructure reasons, I think there's an ‘annoyance factor’ to it if you are trying to do things right, which is also important.”

Stats NZ said privacy was the main reason why census forms could not be saved, or edited once they were submitted.

Its system meant “even other members of the same household cannot view sensitive information that people have entered on their forms”, it said.

Stats NZ noted people are advised before they start the survey and on each page that “once a completed form” has been submitted to Stats it cannot be viewed or edited by anyone in their household.

By “a completed form” it is understood to be referring to the sections for each dwelling and individual.

It has been contacted for further comment on whether there was room for confusion if people thought of each of those as all comprising one single form.

Simmonds believed that Stats NZ was ill-advised to only include a message that people could instead ask for paper census forms most of the way down a letter that explained how to fill out the census online.

He doubted older people would read that far.

“It's after about two-thirds of a page of sort of internet, online gobbledegook. The moment they look at that stuff, it's like looking at a maths paper, they're just like, ‘I'm putting it over there’. Chances are they don't even get to their part of the page.”