Confidentiality

BLS and the Census Bureau know how important it is to keep information private, or confidential.

Federal law¹ requires both BLS and the Census Bureau to keep all information about your household completely confidential. That means that no one other than approved, official government representatives can access your personal information.

This law also protects your information from being shared with other federal agencies. No one other than the Census Bureau and BLS has access to your information. The law applies to the Internal Revenue Service, White House, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, police, and welfare agencies — only specially sworn Census Bureau and BLS employees can see your information.

Anyone breaking this law may face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both. More information on the Census Bureau's data protection policies is available on their web site.

The information that the Census Bureau provides to BLS is in the form of statistics, personal identifiers such as names and addresses are not included. The information you provide is combined with the information provided by all the other households who responded to the survey, and published in a statistical format. If interested, you can see some examples of the data produced by the CE survey.

¹ Title 13, United States Code, Section 8b, authorizes the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct this survey. Section 9 of Title 13, United States Code requires all collected data to be kept confidential.

Last Modified Date: April 7, 2011