Census Bureau Awards EDS $100 Million Contract

The U.S. Census Bureau today awarded a two-year, $100 million contract to EDS. Under the agreement, the services firm will work with the bureau to set up a call-center network for the 2000 census.

Under the Telephone Questionnaire Assistance program, EDS will set up 30 toll-free call centers that will employ as many as 6,000 agents working to collect the national demographic data used to allocate the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and the distribution of federal funds.

The network will be equipped to handle questions in six languages: Chinese, English, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. The bureau is anticipating a volume of approximately 15 million incoming and outgoing calls during the census, which will take place from March through July of 2000.

This is the second contract the Census Bureau has awarded to EDS. Last year, the bureau hired hired EDS and Lockheed Martin to implement the Data Capture 2000 project, which will store the information collected by the census.