Washington » Census officials have jubilantly announced that 72 percent of households mailed back their forms, matching the response rate from 10 years ago. But Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a leading congressional critic of the census, isn't impressed.

He believes the Census Bureau spent way too much money to convince people to mail in the quick survey and he's dismayed by comments from census leaders touting cost savings.

"You would think the Census Bureau would be good at math. Evidently not," said Chaffetz, who sits on the House committee that oversees the bureau. "No matter how you slice, it they did not save money. In fact, the census is spending an exorbitant amount of dollars to achieve the same response rate."

His office released its own calculations, which found that, when adjusted for inflation, the census spent $14.7 billion this year to do what it accomplished in 2000 with $9.3 billion.

"It is outrageous for the census to tout cost-savings success," he said.

Officials at the bureau are not challenging Chaffetz's math, but they are taking issue with his claim that they overspent.

"The Census Bureau invested on the front end to persuade households to mail back the census form and it worked," said Nick Kimball, a Commerce Department spokesman. "With a larger, harder-to-count population, more U.S. households replied by mail than expected and that means taxpayer dollars have been saved."

Kimball said the task of collecting the demographic information has grown more difficult over the decade for a variety of reasons, which include a growing distrust of government, a documented decline in participation in surveys, a larger number of non-English speakers and a big number of foreclosed homes.

On top of that add, 30 million more people.

He said these factors made it impossible to perform the census using the same budget from 2000.

Every form that is mailed back costs the government 42 cents to collect, but it costs about $58 per household to collect the information in person.