In 1995 the National Academy of Sciences released a report recommending revisions to the official measure of poverty. The recommendations included using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) for the basis of official income and poverty statistics. Since then, the Census Bureau has conducted research, and published in a series of reports, a set of alternative measures that are comparable in concept to those used in the Current Population Survey (CPS). This paper compares alternative poverty measures based on the SIPP and the CPS and makes recommendations for future design implementation and estimation procedures.