---
title: "A Building-Maintenance Code Is Carrying $2.31m. Nobody Will Say For What."
dek: "A forensic accountant was given the numbers and told nothing about where they came from. Inside a code for building upkeep she found nursing, transport, drugs and a salary line."
kind: investigation (Investigation)
desk: The Body
author: Loretta Sung (fictional)
published: 2026-08-24T06:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/object-code-7714
tags: Project Monarch, MKUltra, object codes, appropriations, forensic accounting
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

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

*A forensic accountant was given the numbers and told nothing about where they came from. Inside a code for building upkeep she found nursing, transport, drugs and a salary line.*

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](/article/mkultra-subproject-index). 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?

> **Figure:** What object code 7714 bought, four fiscal years, $2,311,000 — see https://theyburied.com/article/object-code-7714

## 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."

> A facilities code does not go out and hire a psychologist. Somebody put her on it, and somebody signed for her, four years running.
>
> — Delphine Abara-Quist

## 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.

## Sources (invented)

- Delphine Abara-Quist, Forensic accountant; audits state child-welfare and residential-care budgets — Commissioned blind, at her standard rate, and given the transaction file with all titles, headers and covering correspondence stripped (March–July 2026)
- Departmental expenditure extracts, four fiscal years, 3,180 disbursements at transaction level, with vendor class and description — Requested as data, refused, appealed, refused again as 'obsolete media', released machine-readable fourteen months after the first request (Released February 2026)
- Alastair Ncube-Fenwick, Retired appropriations examiner, 31 years — Interviewed by telephone three times and shown the coding structure without the amounts (May and June 2026)
- Emlyn A. Trethowan-Pike, Records officer, the successor department — Sent the complete file, the working paper and the full draft; replied in writing after 26 days with no conditions attached (July 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-2095: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2095

## What we could not confirm

- Where the nine buildings were. The facilities inventory identifies them by asset number only. The schedule that turns an asset number into an address sits in a series the successor department has described as 'in accession' since 2019, and the records officer told us on the record that it is not in his custody and that he has asked whose it is. That schedule is the next locked door and we have filed for it.
- Who the vendors were. Every name on the clinical, nursing and pharmacy lines is withheld under a personal-privacy exemption applied at vendor level, which is unusual. Our appeal has been pending for seven months. The appeals officer declines to give a date and has not disputed that the exemption is being applied to companies.
- What 7714 carried in the two fiscal years either side of ours. We have four years because those are the four the department happened to keep in machine-readable form. The extracts before and after were destroyed on a 1979 retention schedule, and we cannot say whether the load on this code began in our first year or was simply first recorded there.

## Right of reply

**Emlyn A. Trethowan-Pike, records officer of the successor department** (Replied 25 July 2026. Printed entire and unedited, including the passages about this newspaper.):

> I will answer your question and then I will tell you why it is the wrong question.
> 
> An object code is an administrative convenience. It is not a description of a purchase and it was never designed to be one. It identifies the appropriation the money is drawn against, so that the comptroller can close a ledger, and the clerk who selects it is choosing from a printed list of about ninety options at the moment of payment, usually under time pressure, usually without any interest in what a historian will make of it forty years later. There is no requirement in the 1966 manual, or in the 1970 revision, that the code correspond to the item. I have read both editions more recently than your accountant has.
> 
> So when you tell me that a code reading 'training facilities: maintenance and subsistence' carries nursing hours and a salary line, you have not told me about a programme. You have told me about a clerk. Broad codes absorb what narrow codes will not take. That is what they are for.
> 
> You ask me which programme these disbursements belonged to. I can tell you that the disbursement form in use in those years carried a field for a programme identifier, and that in this office the field was left blank as a matter of settled practice. I have looked at several hundred of these forms across other appropriations and the field is blank in almost all of them. That is not concealment. That is what the field was worth to the people filling it in.
> 
> You then take the absence of a subproject number and treat it as significant. I would put it the other way round, and I want to be exact, because I think you will quote this sentence and I would rather you quoted it correctly: you will not find a subproject number attached to this money, and you should stop looking for one, because the expenditure was not administered as a subproject. It was administered as facilities disbursement out of a facilities appropriation by a facilities office. Everything you have found is consistent with that and nothing you have found requires anything else.
> 
> On your method. You engaged an accountant, withheld the subject from her, and now present her ignorance as a guarantee of independence. It is also a guarantee that nobody in your process was in a position to say the obvious thing, which is that this expenditure pattern is what an ordinary residential training school looks like when it is paid for out of the wrong pocket. Children in residential care need nurses, laundry, transport and, yes, a psychologist. Your figure is a picture of a boarding institution. You have drawn it as though it were a picture of something else.
> 
> One last thing, and I say it because you will otherwise say I did not. I cannot tell you where those nine buildings were. The schedule that would tell you is not in my custody. I have asked twice which office holds it and have not had an answer, and I am not going to pretend to you that this is normal, because it is not.
> 
> If you want me to certify that this department did not operate a programme out of that office, I cannot do that. I can certify that I hold no record that it did. The absence of a record in my custody is the only thing I am competent to certify, and it is a smaller thing than you want it to be.

---
They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.