First time since 1976

It will be the first time that the year-end target date has been missed since the deadline was implemented in 1976 by Congress. There are no penalties associated with missing the deadline.

The US Commerce Department oversees the Census Bureau, which conducts the head count of every US resident once a decade.

By law, the department must present the president by year's end with population figures from the 2020 census. The data is then used to determine how many seats in the House each state gets. The president then is required to submit the numbers to Congress in early January.

Besides deciding how many House seats each state gets, the census is used for determining how $1.5 trillion in federal funding is distributed each year.

The Commerce Department's inspector general said on Wednesday that the Census Bureau cut corners with a quality-control process and determined the issues call into question the results for "more than 500,000" households.

It said one reason the Census Bureau did not complete the quality checks was because of a compressed time schedule. The coronavirus pandemic in the US also complicated the counting process.

The Census Bureau has not publicly revealed how it plans to determine who is in the country illegally since the Supreme Court last year prohibited a citizenship question from being added to the census questionnaire.

Agencies via Xinhua contributed to this story.