The Scheme Ran Nine Years, Paid Three People, And Kept Two Pages.

WASHINGTON — Congress voted $4.6m in 1978 to compensate people who had been put through the training programmes without valid consent. In nine years the scheme paid out $61,400, to three claimants, and gave $4,529,700 back to the treasury.

The whole administrative file is two pages. We asked for it in 2024, were told it did not exist, appealed, were told it was exempt entirely, appealed again, and got both sheets in June.

Here they are.

Page one, the criteria sheet

To be eligible a claimant shall: (a) have been a person subjected to a training programme conducted or funded by the Bureau without valid consent; (b) supply the case-file number under which the claimant was enrolled; (c) supply the name of the facility and the dates of enrolment; (d) supply a certificate of identity; (e) file not later than five years from the date of this notice.

No claim shall be considered which omits the case-file number required at (b).

Page two, the payments schedule

Claim 002 — approved — $19,400 — paid 14 March 1980

Claim 007 — approved — $19,400 — paid 2 October 1981

Claim 011 — approved — $22,600 — paid 9 June 1984

Claims received, 11. Claims approved, 3. Balance unobligated at close, $4,529,700. — E. D-V.

Against each of the three approvals the third column carries the same four words: number supplied, claimant's copy.

All three had kept their own paperwork at home.

The five years

Records Control Schedule 14, approved in 1968, disposes of the enrolment records at item 6. It is fourteen words long: Case files, individual — destroy five years after termination of enrolment. Permanent: none.

Destruction certificate 73-118 was executed under it. It covers "case files, all series", it is dated 1973, and it gives no count.

So the number the claimant was required to supply in 1978 had been pulped in 1973 by the same agency that would go on to require it. The schedule and the eligibility rule were written ten years apart, by different offices, and there is nothing in either file showing that anybody put the two documents on the same desk.

Only one of them was ever enforced.

Eleven letters

Eleven claims arrived in nine years. Three had the number. Eight did not, and the file holds no refusal letters, no correspondence register and no note of what the eight contained, because no correspondence series was ever opened for the scheme. The release letter says so in terms.

Mrs. Ellamae Dorsey-Vance, whose initials close page two, has replied to this newspaper in one paragraph and would not add to it. She says she asked in 1979 whether the number could be taken as read where the claimant had the facility and the dates right, and was told no in one sentence, and that she no longer has the sentence.

Her last line is at the foot of this page and it is the coldest thing in the file.

What the line proves

A legislature does not appropriate $4.6m to compensate a class of person it believes to be imaginary.

That is the part worth holding on to. Long before this newspaper photographed a printer's four states of the intake form, the government had already written its own finding into statute: that there were persons subjected to training programmes without valid consent, that they were owed money, and that $4.6m was roughly what it would take.

The forty-one words in that supplemental are not a rumour about the programme. They are the government's accounting for it.

Then the scheme was built so that the door opened only for people who had walked out of a facility holding their own admission card, and there turned out to be three of them.

The money went home in 1987. Nobody has voted any since.