The Last Bearer Bonds Are Real. Nine Coupons Were Presented Last Year.

PARSIPPANY, United States — Nine coupons were presented for payment last year at the last counter in the United States that still pays them over the desk, without an appointment, to whoever walks in.

Six were brought by executors settling a dead relative's affairs. One came from a bank clearing an abandoned safe-deposit box. One came from a collector who wanted the cancellation stamp for a scrapbook and was paid $27.50 for the privilege.

One came from a retired mechanic in Cranford who found a shoebox in his mother's linen closet.

The nine came to $412.50.

In 1979, the predecessor bank's four windows took 41,208.

The office park

Hallam Fiduciary Services occupies the second floor of a two-storey building off Route 10 in Parsippany, New Jersey, between an orthodontist and a firm that resurfaces parking lots.

It is the paying agent of record for thirty-one corporate bond issues sold before 1 July 1983, and for three utility bearer certificates whose issuers no longer exist in any other form.

Bearer paper pays whoever holds it. There is no register of ownership, because that is the design: the certificate is the claim, the coupons are the interest, and you cut one off with scissors and hand it across.

Doreen Achterberg-Fyfe has run the window since 1998. She has a bone folder, a steel rule, a cloth-spined book and a rubber stamp that reads PAID AND CANCELLED. She initials beside it.

Forty-four years of one book

The agency let us photograph the log on the condition that presenter names, addresses and tax numbers were masked before we left the building. The masking was done in the room, by the agency, while our correspondent watched. For 1979 and 1981 we have used the predecessor bank's annual returns, which give totals and no names.

The line does not fall off a cliff, and it did not fall off one in 1983 either. The registration rules of 1982 stopped the issue of new bearer bonds from the following July. They did not cancel what was outstanding, and what was outstanding has been maturing, one series at a time, ever since.

Lowell Chandaria-Beek, who worked on those rules, told us three times in three different ways that they were written about tax collection and not about secrecy, and that everybody afterwards — including, he said, this newspaper — ran the two words together.

The part that gets left out

Bearer never meant untraceable.

To be paid at that window you must give a name, a taxpayer identification number and a bank account. Without the tax number the agency withholds twenty-four per cent and remits it. Payment is by transfer; the window has not paid cash since 2003. Anything above $10,000 is reported to the Treasury's financial-crimes bureau before the presenter reaches the stairs.

The physical trouble is real. Perforations between coupons go brittle, and a sixty-year-old sheet tears across the face rather than along the line. Three tore in 2024. Each then needs an affidavit of mutilation, notarised, which takes longer than the coupon is worth.

Ms Achterberg-Fyfe objects, below, to our calling this her principal difficulty. She says it is a step with a form, and the form is older than she is.

The suitcases

The famous bearer bonds are the seized ones: cases stopped at borders, certificates with face values in the hundreds of billions, photographs that have circulated for twenty years.

We sent fourteen of those photographs and one seized sheet, obtained through counsel, to a forensic document examiner who was not told what we hoped she would find.

The engraving resolves to a halftone screen at 133 lines to the inch. Intaglio has no screen, because it has no halftone; what is on that sheet is a photograph of a picture of a bond. The stock is 24-pound office bond carrying an optical brightener that fluoresces under ultraviolet. Security paper does not fluoresce. That is one of the things it is for.

The denominations do not exist. The largest bearer denomination Hallam has ever paid is $100,000, and we can find no issuer that ever created a certificate of $500 million. On the sheet we examined, the attached coupons fall due on 31 September.

What this desk takes from it

We went looking for the most anonymous instrument ever devised and found a procedure, a form for torn paper, and a woman who says the procedure would carry on without her by Thursday.

Her reply is printed below, unedited, and it is the best thing on this page. She thinks we have made a fact about a rota into a fact about the world, and she is right that we did.

She expects six presentations this year. Two have come in.