ASA Connect

On my inbound flight from an overseas trip, I dutifully filled in the Customs Declaration, that blue and white card that you turn in at the airport. Only on arriving at the immigration hall, there were these self-serve customs machines where you scanned your passport, took a selfie, and then answered the customs questions. However, the 8 items on the front of the card were squished into 4 on the computer screen, each a mile long. And the backside where you list all your purchases, add it all up and fess up about how much you spent bucking up someone else's economy; that was replaced by a question confirming that you spent less than a certain amount. Silly me, but I always thought that Homeland Security had an army of data entry clerks entering all that information about kinds of purchases and prices, and that this fed into the national accounts somehow. Apparently this is wrong; it doesn't matter anymore. And I have deep methodological concerns about question statement, whether someone off an 8-hour flight is really going to read the long questions, and whether it isn't easier to lie to a machine. The world is changing!

-------------------------------------------
Mark Pierzchala
Owner
MMP Survey Services, LLC
-------------------------------------------

Interesting concerns.  I think the heart of the problem is that smart people have a terrible time filling our forms.   I recall my family's struggle with the blue and white customs form.  They ask you to fill out  one per family:   So does number of people traveling with yoo mean the total in the party counting you or the others (n-1) who are with you?   Since my wife kept her maiden name, does she need her own form?  I, in turn, would usually write "tsatskes" for the collection of junk souvenirs we were importing. Did I spell it correctly? Would the agent care?  Hardly.   I think I finally realized the Customs agents are after fish a lot bigger than me, so you get plenty of degrees of freedom on that form.
-------------------------------------------
Barry Nussbaum
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
-------------------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: 02-16-2015 17:13
From: Mark Pierzchala
Subject: Customs Declaration Form

On my inbound flight from an overseas trip, I dutifully filled in the Customs Declaration, that blue and white card that you turn in at the airport. Only on arriving at the immigration hall, there were these self-serve customs machines where you scanned your passport, took a selfie, and then answered the customs questions. However, the 8 items on the front of the card were squished into 4 on the computer screen, each a mile long. And the backside where you list all your purchases, add it all up and fess up about how much you spent bucking up someone else's economy; that was replaced by a question confirming that you spent less than a certain amount. Silly me, but I always thought that Homeland Security had an army of data entry clerks entering all that information about kinds of purchases and prices, and that this fed into the national accounts somehow. Apparently this is wrong; it doesn't matter anymore. And I have deep methodological concerns about question statement, whether someone off an 8-hour flight is really going to read the long questions, and whether it isn't easier to lie to a machine. The world is changing!

-------------------------------------------
Mark Pierzchala
Owner
MMP Survey Services, LLC
-------------------------------------------