In 2009 the Office of Management and Budget’s Chief Statistician formed an Interagency Technical Working Group (ITWG) on Developing a Supplemental Poverty Measure. That group included representatives from the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economics and Statistics Administration, Council of Economic Advisers, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Office of Management and Budget. In March 2010 the Interagency Working Group issued a series of suggestions to the Census Bureau and BLS on how to develop a new Supplemental Poverty Measure (Observations from the Interagency Technical Working Group on Developing a Supplemental Poverty Measure). Their suggestions drew on the recommendations of the 1995 report of National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel on Poverty and Family Assistance and the extensive research on poverty measurement conducted over the past 15 years, at the Census Bureau and elsewhere. 

Since 2010, the Census Bureau has produced estimates using the Supplemental Poverty Measure. This paper will describe the methodology currently used by the Census Bureau to estimate the value of housing assistance in order to add this value to the resource estimate used in the Supplemental Poverty Measure. The paper will then evaluate the elements of this approach by using an exact statistical match between the CPS ASEC and HUD administrative data.  Unless noted elsewhere, this paper will use data from the 2013 CPS ASEC, that is data collected in February, March and April of 2013 with a reference period of calendar year 2012.