This report has two main parts. The first part of the report presents the results of a study comparing three options for benchmarking monthly time series to annual surveys or censuses. The three penalty functions to be minimized are the sum of squares of the month-to-month changes of the unadjusted data (UA method), seasonally adjusted data (SA method), and relative month-to-month changes (REL method). We studied the differences between methods in terms of revisions (differences between the original and the benchmarked series) in levels, month-to-month changes in the unadjusted and seasonally adjusted data, and in the X-11 seasonal factors. We found no practical differences in the percent revisions in level between the SA and UA methods. The differences were at most 2.3 percent for one series and .59 percent or less for the rest of the series. We found that the UA method obtained lower median absolute month-to-month change revisions of the unadjusted data. The UA method also obtained smaller median absolute revisions of the seasonally adjusted data for a majority of the series studied. In comparing the REL method to the UA method the benchmarked series were identical to the second decimal place.