Pearson lands Census contract

Pearson Government Solutions announced Tuesday that it had secured a contract to compile data as part of the 2010 U.S. Census.

The contract will be worth more than $100 million, the company said.

Pearson Government Solutions, based in Arlington, Va., is the largest private-sector employer in Lawrence, with more than 1,700 people working at a data center in the East Hills Business Park. The center handles more than a dozen government contracts, taking calls and fielding inquiries regarding Medicare, immigration and other topics.

Terry Kroshus, call center director in Lawrence, said it was too early to tell whether any of the Census work would make its way to Lawrence. Pearson handled work for the 2000 census, and hired about 4,000 people to work in a data center in Phoenix, established specifically for that task.

While the previous work focused on large-scale data management and human-resource management, the contract announced Tuesday is for a different part of the process. This time, Pearson operations will take millions of completed Census forms and transfer the responses into electronic data.