A lesson for StatsNZ?

This comes from a paper "Skill Measurement in Official Statistics: Recent Developments in the UK and the rest of Europe" by Peter Elias and Abigail McKnight, Oxford Economic Papers 3 (2001), 508–540.

An amusing and extreme example derives from the 1981 Census of Population carried out in the Channel Island of Jersey. One census question consisted simply of the word ‘Occupation’, with an empty box alongside for the written response. Many older residents wrote in ‘1939–1945’.