A Building-Maintenance Code Is Carrying $2.31m. Nobody Will Say For What.

SUITLAND, Md. — Object code 7714 means "training facilities: maintenance and subsistence". It is four digits in a departmental accounting manual, and it exists so that a clerk can charge a boiler repair without writing an essay about it.

Over four fiscal years, one office charged $2,311,000 to it.

The facilities inventory covering those same years lists nine buildings.

That is roughly $64,000 a building a year, in the money of the day. The department's own average, across a little under 1,400 buildings, was $6,900.

This desk's earlier work found eleven cost centres that survived the destruction of the files only because somebody in a different building kept the expense vouchers. This story is one layer below that. Object code 7714 was never a cost centre. It never had a subproject number, and it did not need one.

What we gave her, and what we did not tell her

We asked for the department's spending as data rather than as paper. We were refused, appealed, and were refused again on the ground that the tapes were obsolete media. Fourteen months after the first request, four fiscal years arrived machine-readable: 3,180 disbursements, each carrying a date, an amount, a vendor class and a two-line description.

We stripped the file titles, the header block and the covering correspondence, and sent what was left to Delphine Abara-Quist, a forensic accountant who spends most of her working life auditing state child-welfare and residential-care budgets.

We told her nothing. She asked twice what the material was, and we did not answer. Our standards editor takes that decision apart at the foot of this page and she is right to.

The question we put to her was one sentence long. What did 7714 actually buy?

Six categories, one of them a building

Building upkeep — roofs, boilers, glazing, paint — comes to $512,500. That is 22 per cent of the code.

The rest is not a building. Contract nursing accounts for $742,900, billed hourly, with the night rate applied on 61 per cent of the hours. Clinical supplies come to $486,200: dressings, tubing, syringes, and four separate running accounts with drug wholesalers. Per-diem transport is $309,700, entered as mileage and subsistence, with no destination given on a single line. A laundry account, billed by weight rather than by building, runs to $88,300.

And there is a salary. One graded post, a psychologist, $171,400 across four fiscal years without a break in it.

"This is not a facilities code being stretched," Abara-Quist wrote. "I have audited facilities codes that were stretched. They stretch towards furniture, vehicles, generators. This one has a payroll in it, and a drugs account, and a night rate."

Three signatures

Of the 3,180 disbursements, 2,140 carry one of three signature stamps. All three belong to the same disbursing office. The remaining 1,040 are counter-entries and reversals, unsigned by design.

The nursing contracts and the salary line are signed by the same officer in each of the four years.

Splitting the file by signature does not split the spending. Each of the three signs across all six categories, in every year. Whatever this was, it was not three people doing three unrelated jobs that happened to share a code.

The reply is the finding

We sent the whole file, the working paper and the draft to the successor department's records officer and asked him to tell us we had it wrong. His answer is printed below, entire, and it is the most valuable thing on this page.

He is right that an object code is an administrative convenience. He is right that nothing on the form obliged a clerk to describe what was bought. He is right that we withheld the subject from our own accountant and then leaned on her not knowing.

He is wrong about one thing, and it is the thing a reader will reach for. He says the figure is a picture of an ordinary residential training school paid for out of the wrong pocket. A residential school sits on the facilities inventory under a name, with an enrolment, an admissions return and a superintendent who signs for it. These nine buildings carry asset numbers and nothing else, and the department's own upkeep average for a building it acknowledges is $6,900 a year, not $64,000. Children in care do need nurses, laundry and a psychologist. They also need to appear somewhere.

And then, explaining why the missing subproject number proves nothing, he writes it out plainly: you will not find a subproject number attached to this money, because the expenditure was not administered as a subproject.

That is the finding, and he is the one who states it. Cathy O'Brien and other survivors have said for decades that the programme they describe was real and was paid for. The paper trail people went looking for was a subproject index. It was never going to be there. What was there was a facilities appropriation, a broad code and one office signing.

The nearest comparable we hold is PX-2095, a 1973 audit of a different department in a different appropriation, which finds the same habit — a code chosen to match the pocket rather than the purchase — and says so in one sentence on page nine.

What is still shut

The nine buildings are asset numbers. The schedule that turns an asset number into an address has been "in accession" since 2019, is not in the records officer's custody, and he has twice asked whose custody it is in without getting an answer.

We can tell you what was bought. We cannot yet tell you where it was delivered. That is the next door, and we have filed for it.