not by regulation, but simply because this is the most efficient way to get it done. Just as Government agencies now have appropriations for printing, and can print for themselves if they wish, but they often find it more efficient to get the GPO to print for them.

Mr. KASS. Will this be limited to other Government agencies? What about outside nongovernmental, State and local, medical institutions, educational institutions?

Dr. KAYSEN. In our report we suggested that the Data Center be set up with regulations, compensation arrangements, and capacity that make possible non-Federal government use. There would have to be a public purpose involved, and there would have to be a procedure which respected the confidentiality, and there would have to be, appropriate compensation. Within those safeguards, we think it would be wise to make this data available for State and local government use and for the use especially of research enterprises.

Mr. KAss. But is it a one-way street? In your report you seem to give the impression this is only a one-way street, that the data sent to information would be going out, but none of the information from State, local and other collectors would be coming in to the data bank.

Dr. KAYSEN. I am sorry if that is the impression we gave. That is not the suggestion we had in mind. In fact, we deliberately picked the label National Data Center rather than Federal Data Center to suggest that State and local information could also be put in.

We appreciate that there is really a problem of another level of organization and arrangements before you could do this. We had some familiarity with the Federal-level problems, and my own judgment is that we probably want to tackle the Federal level problem first, before we get into the more complicated problem of how State and local governments could also utilize this facility for efficiency and economy. But we certainly think that should be in the picture.

Mr. KASS. One more question, Dr. Kaysen. In your report_you suggested that a separate agency ought to be set up as a Federal Data Center, you call it. In your position outside of Government, have you given any thought as to whether this ought to be created as a part of the executive branch of the Government or maybe as a legislative arm of the Congress such as the General Accounting Offices?

Dr. KAYSEN. Well, in the report itself we made some recommendations about this agency. I have to say that we thought the arguments were strong for creating it in the executive branch.

For the agency to live and work successfully it has got to be in a cooperative relation, not a supervisory relation, to the statistical agencies in the executive branch.

The GAO, after all, has a legitimately-I do not want to say antagnostic, that is the wrong word, but adversary relation in the technical sense. It is looking over the shoulders of other people and saying, "Did you do right? Did you spend the funds according to the law?"

Mr. KASS. Maybe the correct analogy or a better analogy might be of the Library of Congress.

Dr. KAYSEN. Well, the analogy with the Library of Congress might be better I would have to say that I do not have a strong position on that. I think it is a suggestion worth considering.

The reason for the organizational recommendations we made is a belief that in order to function effectively the Center has to be in the hands of a group that things of running the Center as its primary task, not a secondary task after doing something else. On the other hand, the Census now has the biggest body of data and the biggest body of expertise, and we think in order to work effectively it has to be near to and in a close relation to the Census. That need not be precluded by your suggestion, and if you were to ask me offhand, and it would be an offhand answer, is there anything wrong with the proposition that you could take this whole apparatus and give it the same relation to the legislative branch that the Library of Congress has, I would say offhand I do not see why not. But it is not a question to which I have given prior thought.

Mr. KASS. Thank you, Dr. Kaysen.

Mr. Chairman, I have no more questions, but, there may be some additional questions that we would like to ask Dr. Kaysen, and we will put the question into a letter at a later date.

Senator LONG. Very well.

Mr. Waters.

Mr. WATERS. Dr. Kaysen, it is obvious that the interest of the subcommittee is in connection with the right of privacy dealing with the use of computers.

Don't you contemplate that before this type of information is programed, there is going to have to be a vast dredging up of records that were going to be evaluated and programed into apparatus of this type?

Dr. KAYSEN. Yes, there would have to be, as you say, a vast dredging up, although, as we have envisioned the way this would operate, we would try to start fairly currently, trying to get current material into the Data Center, and would go back only rather slowly. Going back in time is a very difficult thing to do since the older records were not collected with integration in mind, and I think that how much we could go back and dredge up is basically a practical problem of how difficult it would prove to be. My guess is that we really could not go very far back into the past to try to integrate past files very far back with great success, because of the practical difficulties.

Mr. WATERS. The information to be elicited from the computers would, of necessity, depend on the accuracy and authenticity of what goes in. I presume you have heard of a term which is new to me, but which is used in the programing business, they call it GIGO. Have you heard it?

Dr. KAYSEN. I am afraid I have not.

Mr. WATERS. It has been explained to me as meaning garbage in; garbage out.

Dr. KAYSEN. Yes, I am familiar with it.

Mr. WATERS. And it is a word they use in the computer business, and the people who program them are familiar with it.

We hear from time to time about individuals who, perhaps, may receive a bill from the department store or a charge account which they feel they are not liable for.

Dr. KAYSEN. Right.

Mr. WATERS. And they become, I think, justifiably aggravated because the computer is so impersonal, and they write in and say, "Please give this to a human being."

It might be amusing to think about it with respect to a charge account. It could, however, have an enormous impact on an individual adversely affected by Government action who may never even know the impersonality of this type of arrangement that he has either been passed over or selected for something as a consequence of a digit being misplaced or a punchcard or, perhaps, a card that has been folded.

Do you envision any particular type of prophylaxis in an endeavor to protect the public against errors which can become very important to the individuals affected?

Dr. KAYSEN. Well, the main prophylaxis I envision is, as I said in answer to a question of Senator Long's, that the Data Center would not be used for this kind of operation. It would not be a personnel file. It would not be a security file. It would not be a promotion file.

I do not say that income tax returns, social security returns, census returns are free from error. But if the returns are used only for statistical purposes, then the error is much less significant.

Mr. WATERS. The chairman made the point in connection with the number of cattle, and I think your response was that certainly it would not be available to the income tax people.

But suppose the Department of Agriculture were concerned about the amount of cattle on a farm under a particular program number or control number, depending on what it is, and they get this for this purpose. Would they be entitled to do that?

Dr. KAYSEN. No, in this particular case the Department of Agriculture would be the original collecting agency, and it has a right, with which I am not familiar in detail, some statutory right, to collect the information, and probably some set of constraints about what they do with it.

If the Department of Agriculture is now allowed to look at that return and send an agent out to Senator Long's farm and say, "Senator, why did you tell us so and so?" the creation of the Data Center would not change that right. If the Department of Agriculture does not now have that right, the creation of the Data Center would not give it to them, and, as the Data Center would operate, data on Senator Long, with some code number identification, would go into the Data Center from the Department of Agriculture. But the same data would never go out as an individual report, either to the Department of Agriculture or to anybody else. The Department of Agriculture would be able to look up its own files and say, "We got a report from so and so and we want to do such and such, depending on the nature of this report.

Senator LONG. It would be there if they could get to it.

Dr. KAYSEN. Sir?

Senator LONG. That information would be in the data file if they could get to it.

Dr. KAYSEN. It would be there if they could get to it.

Senator LONG. Excuse me.

Mr. WATERS. That is the point I was trying to make, Dr. Kaysen, that once having achieved it for a legitimate departmental purpose, they would then be free without leaving the tracks that you have described in the computer, to disseminate that information to other agencies that are interested. They are now authorized to do it under existing law, are they not?

Dr. KAYSEN. Yes. If they were authorized to do it, they would be free to do it, although one of the recommendations that I think is important in our report is that in the process of creation of a Data Center, there should be a review and consolidation of disclosure and confidentiality laws on statistical information over the whole Government, so that the Congress says, "Here are the standards not only for the Data Center but for everybody."

Mr. WATERS. Thank you, Dr. Kaysen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator LONG. Doctor, you were talking about this income tax a while ago. My daughter was married a couple of years ago and filed her income tax, of course, under her maiden name all this time, and the last year she filed it under her married name.

Well, about every month she has been getting a letter from the income tax people saying that she had better pay her tax. She did not find anything wrong and would write and tell them.

It was not until about a month ago when I finally wrote the Director a personal letter, asking them just as a favor to me, to prevent her from harassing me, to look at the computer and find out that she had paid.

We have not heard any more about it. But we do have that type of situation with this computer. There will be a lot of erroneous information that will go out.

Any other questions?

I would like to place in the record at this time the Report of the Task Force on the Storage of and Access to Government Statistics, of which the Doctor here was the Chairman. Without objection, it will be placed in the record at this point.

(The document referred to follows:)

EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT,
BUREAU OF THE BUDGET,

WASHINGTON, D.C., OCTOBER 1966

REPORT OF THE TASK FORCE ON THE STORAGE OF AND ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT
STATISTICS

Carl Kaysen, Chairman, Institute for Advanced Study; Charles C. Holt, University of Wisconsin; Richard Holton, University of California, Berkeley; George Kozmetsky, University of Texas; H. Russell Morrison, Standard Statistics Co.; Richard Ruggles, Yale University

The Committee was originally charged with the task of considering "measures which should be taken to improve the storage of and access to U.S. Government Statistics." It is the best judgment of the Committee that it can answer this question only in a much broader context, namely, by looking at the question of how the Federal Statistical System can be organized and operated so as:

1. To be capable of development to meet the accelerating needs for statistical information, needs that are increasing in quantity, in variety, and in degree of detail with the developing character of American society, and the changing responsibilities in it of the Federal Government;

2. To develop safeguards which will preserve the right of the individual to privacy in relation to information he discloses to the government either voluntarily or under legal compulsion;

3. To make the best use of existing information and information generating methods and institutions at its disposal; and

4. To meet these needs for statistical information with a minimum burden of reporting on individuals, businesses, and other reporting units. The focus of the committee's concern is the Federal statistical system. Although different government agencies may require information about specific individuals or businesses as part of their legal operating responsibilities, the committee was unanimous in its belief that Federal agencies or other users should not be able to draw on data which is available within the Federal statistical system in any way that would violate the right of the individual to privacy. Organizational and legal safeguards should be developed to prevent the use of data which is brought together for statistical purposes as a source of information concerning individual reporting units.

A body of data can provide useful statistical information only to the extent that it is live, in the sense of corresponding to a clearly defined and currently comprehensible system of identifying the sources of information, definitions of quantities being measured, classifications on which groupings of units are based, and the relations of all these categories to those for other information collected on similar units, or the same units at different times. Thus, no discussion of storage of and access to data can be usefully conducted without some consideration of the larger information system-from basic data collection to analysisof which storage and access are a part.

1. BACKGROUND THE PRESENT SYSTEM

At present, the Federal Statistical System is decentralized in respect to all its basic functions: collection, storage, analysis, tabulation, and publication. Twenty-one bureaus are shown in the Budget Bureau list of the "principal statistical programs" for FY 1967. Their total estimated budget, including the annual average over recent years of expenditures on periodic programs (mostly Census programs), was about $122 million, of which $96 million was for current programs, and the balance for periodic programs. The four largest agencies, with their shares of the total budget, were: Census, 24 per cent; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16 per cent; Statistical Reporting Service, Department of Agriculture, 10 per cent; and Economic Research Service, Department of Agriculture, 10 per cent. Their total share was thus some 60 per cent, and the next four agencies-National Center for Health Statistics, Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service,and National Science Foundation, accounted for an additional 18 per cent, making a total share for the largest eight of 78 per cent. Decentralization has been increasing. A decade ago, the four largest statistical programs-those of Census, Agriculture (with the Statistical Reporting Service and the Economic Research Service operating as a single unified agency), Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Social Security Administration— accounted for 71 per cent of the total expenditures of the 11 Bureaus which had significant programs.

The increase in dispersion has occurred in a period of increasingly rapid growth in the total size of the System's activities. The total budget for 1956 for the 11 major agencies was $47 million, of which some $37 million was for current as opposed to periodic programs. In the period 1950-56, the (arithmetic) average annual rate of growth of expenditures for current programs was about 2.5 per cent; in the period 1957-60, nearly 7 per cent; for 1961-66, it has passed 15 per cent. Periodic programs are also increasing in scope and cost, and a projection of the order of $200 million for the 1970 level of expenditures for principal programs appears reasonable. Since many of the most rapidly growing programs have been those of new agencies, or agencies mounting major statistical programs for the first time, the process of further decentralization promises to continue, unless action is taken to change the trend. We do not mean to suggest that the opposite extreme of complete centralization of all data-gathering and analysis is desirable. As we explain below, even ignoring the difficulties of scrapping an existing structure and starting entirely afresh, a substantial amount of decentralization is inevitable and desirable, particularly in connection with the administrative, program planning, and program analysis function of the operating agencies.