Eleven Times They Scheduled The Gold Count. Nine Times They Didn't.
The annual audit happens and is published. This is the other one — a full re-assay of every bar, scheduled eleven times and done twice. Two of the nine postponement memos are the same eleven words, twenty-two years apart.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
WASHINGTON — The gold is audited every year, the results are published, and this story is not about that.
It is about a second, much larger exercise — a full physical re-assay of every bar, involving drilling, sampling, and re-casting — which has been formally scheduled eleven times since 1974 and completed twice.
Nine times it was postponed. We asked for the reasons.
The nine
The Inspector General's office released nine of eleven scheduling memoranda in April, after a request filed in February 2024 and one appeal. Two are withheld under the deliberative-process exemption and we are appealing those.
Six of the nine are as dull as Professor Vaillancourt-Sekibo predicted before he had read them.
The two odd ones
The 1981 and 2003 memoranda are the same sentence.
Not the same reason expressed twice in different words — the same eleven words, in the same order, twenty-two years apart, in documents produced by different offices under different administrations:
the conditions described in the attached are not present at this time.
Neither memorandum has an attachment in the released material. Neither is listed in the release index as having had one. The 1981 document's index entry gives its extent as one page; so does the 2003 one.
We put this to the Treasury, which did not address it in its response, and to the Inspector General's office, which said it releases what it holds.
Professor Vaillancourt-Sekibo, who thinks the whole affair is boring and said so repeatedly, was not bored by this.
"That is a template," he said. "That is somebody in 2003 opening a filing cabinet, finding the 1981 memo, and copying its formula because it was the formula that had worked. Bureaucracies do this constantly. It is not sinister and it is not nothing — it tells you the 2003 office regarded 1981 as precedent, which means somebody in 2003 read a 1981 file about this."
Why the exercise is genuinely hard
Marvella Odunlade-Price supervised assay work for nineteen years and took part in two of the eleven scheduled exercises, including the 2011–12 one that went ahead.
She spent forty minutes explaining, without being asked twice, why a full physical re-assay is not a matter of counting.
A bar must be drilled. The drillings must be assayed. Assaying destroys the sample. The bar's serial, weight, and fineness must be reconciled against a ledger that in places is a card index. And the vault is closed while it happens.
"People think the hard part is the security," she said. "The hard part is the arithmetic and the fact that you cannot do it twice. Every bar you touch, you have changed. Nobody wants to be the person who touched it."
What this story establishes
That a full re-assay has been scheduled eleven times and done twice; that the nine postponements are mostly about money; that two of them share an eleven-word sentence and a missing attachment; and that the Treasury's answer to all of it is that the annual audit exists and is published, which it does and it is.
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Sources & Method
One FOIA request, filed once, appealed once, and two years of waiting. We asked for the scheduling memoranda rather than the audit reports, because the reports are published and the scheduling is not. We printed all nine we received, in date order, with the ordinary ones first.
Who we spoke to
- Office of the Inspector General, Records office. Freedom of Information Act request filed 3 February 2024; partial release 11 April 2026 2024–2026 Nine of eleven scheduling memoranda released. Two withheld under (b)(5).
- Marvella Odunlade-Price, Retired assay office supervisor. Interviewed in person in Denver 9 May 2026 Participated in two of the eleven scheduled audits, including one that went ahead.
- Prof. Terrence Vaillancourt-Sekibo, Historian of public accounting. Interviewed by video call 14 May 2026 Explains why a full physical bullion audit is genuinely difficult, at length, and thinks the postponements are mostly boring.
- The Treasury press office, Written questions. Submitted 2 June 2026; response received 26 June June 2026 Response printed in full.
What we could not confirm
- The contents of the two withheld memoranda. We are appealing and will publish the outcome either way.
- Whether the repeated sentence in the 1981 and 2003 memoranda is a quotation, a template, or a coincidence. Nobody we asked recognised it.
- Whether any of the eleven postponements is connected to any other. Nothing in the nine we have suggests it and we are not going to imply it.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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Signal & LedgerTreasury Points To Annual Audit As Re-Assay Papers Surface
Led on the department's answer and printed the annual audit's URL in the second paragraph, which we did not.
Had that we did not
The link. Readers of their piece could go and check the thing that exists; readers of ours had to take our word that it does.
Left out
The repeated eleven-word sentence in the 1981 and 2003 memoranda, which is the only unusual thing in the release.
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The Meridian TelegraphTHE GOLD AUDIT THEY KEEP CANCELLING
Counted the postponements and stopped there.
Had that we did not
Nothing.
Left out
That the exercise in question is not the annual audit; that the annual audit is published; and the department's answer, which was not sought.
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They Buriedthis newspaperEleven Times They Scheduled The Gold Count. Nine Times They Didn't.
Asked for the scheduling memoranda rather than the audit reports, and printed all nine received in date order.
Had that we did not
The nine memoranda and the duplicated sentence.
Left out
We did not link to the published annual audit until the third edition, which meant that for six hours our story implied an absence that does not exist. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted The Department of the Treasury on 2 June 2026 at 09:30 UTC, in writing, with all nine memoranda attached and 21 days to respond. Responded on 26 June 2026. Statement printed in full and unedited.
The annual audit of the Department's gold reserves has been conducted and published every year since 1993, and the results are on our website.
The documents you have obtained concern a different exercise: a full physical re-assay and re-weighing of every bar, which is a distinct undertaking involving the melting and re-casting of sample bars, requiring the assay capacity of facilities that have other statutory obligations, and which has been attempted at intervals since 1974.
Such an exercise has been scheduled eleven times and completed twice. It is expensive, it takes the vault offline for months, and it has been deprioritised in favour of the annual audit on nine occasions, generally on cost grounds, which is what the memoranda you hold say.
We would ask you to report that the annual audit exists, is published, and is not the exercise your story is about.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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