English language question - noun / verb agreement

I was wondering if anyone can confirm definitively a divergence that I presume in American and English grammar. I actually tend to mix and match, perhaps because I have lived on both sides of ocean...

What I presume is that when British use a singular noun to signify a group of which many people are members, they use a plural verb. Americans, by contrast, use a singular verb. Is this correct?

Examples:

British: The Congress are working hard to pass this Bill.
Americans: The Congress is working hard to pass this Bill.

As for myself, as I have already indicated, I do a bit of both. I say stuff like, "The Smith family are wonderful," or "The crew are working on this production," but I would still say "the Congress IS." So, I'm pretty muddled.

But, am I correct about this British-American plural-singular difference?

p.s. If this is so, purely as a matter of opinion, I think the British have got the right idea, and the American way usually sounds kind of strange.

 

But while the noun is singular, it really is representing more than one thing.

Your responses made me doubt myself for a split second, so I did a little research on my own, and found that I am not crazy. From The American Heritage Book of English Usage:

"There is grammatical agreement, as discussed above, and agreement in meaning, or notional agreement. Usually grammatical agreement and notional agreement coincide. In the sentence He laughs, both are singular. In the sentence We laugh, both are plural. But in some sentences a subject can have a singular form and a plural meaning. Thus in the sentence Her family are all avid skiers, the noun family is singular in form but plural in meaning, and the verb is plural to agree with the meaning. In other words, there is notional agreement, but not grammatical agreement, between the subject and the verb. In the sentence Everyone has gone to the movies, the situation is reversed. The subject everyone is plural in meaning and singular in form, but the verb agrees in number with the form of its grammatical subject. There is grammatical agreement but not notional agreement.
Similarly, there are some nouns like mumps and news that are plural in form but take a singular verb: The mumps was once a common childhood disease. Amounts often take a singular verb: Ten thousand bucks is a lot of money. Here again we have notional, but not grammatical, agreement—the ten thousand bucks is considered a single quantity, and it gets a singular verb."


Note the line: "Her family ARE avid skiers." My question was merely does this rule differ depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on? And I think I was right about that too: http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000193.htm

So, are you Brits saying that you don't speak like this? That, rather, you would say "The government IS announcing an important decision." ???