--- title: "The Scheme Ran Nine Years, Paid Three People, And Kept Two Pages." dek: "Congress voted $4.6m in 1978 to compensate people trained without consent. Eligibility required a case-file number. The programme's own retention schedule had destroyed the case files five years earlier. Eleven people applied." kind: brief (Brief) desk: The Body author: Loretta Sung (fictional) published: 2026-08-24T05:30:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/two-pages-three-payments tags: compensation, consent, Bureau of Special Placement, records retention, appropriations genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Scheme Ran Nine Years, Paid Three People, And Kept Two Pages. *Congress voted $4.6m in 1978 to compensate people trained without consent. Eligibility required a case-file number. The programme's own retention schedule had destroyed the case files five years earlier. Eleven people applied.* 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. > **Figure:** One appropriation, nine years: what $4.6m did between 1978 and 1987 — see https://theyburied.com/article/two-pages-three-payments ## 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. > The unremarkable ones are how this usually happens. Nobody has to intend it. You simply write the eligibility rule out of the record system rather than out of the harm. > > — Dr. Sunniva Delacroix-Rios ## 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](/article/revision-c-four-drafts), 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. ## Sources (invented) - The administrative file of the compensation scheme, Two pages: an eligibility criteria sheet and a payments schedule — Requested in June 2024 and told no such file existed; appealed, and told it was exempt in its entirety; appealed again and received both pages, unredacted, in June 2026 (June 2026) - The 1978 supplemental appropriation and its conference report, Public statute and public committee print — Read at the depository, then checked against both chambers' engrossed bills (March 2026) - Records Control Schedule 14 and destruction certificate 73-118, The programme's own retention schedule, approved 1968, and the certificate executed under it — Obtained from the archives' accession file after the scheme file arrived and the case-file requirement made us go looking (July 2026) - Mrs. Ellamae Dorsey-Vance, Administrator of the scheme, 1978–1985; her initials are on page two — Traced through a retirement notice, telephoned once, then sent the full draft and both pages and given four weeks (July and August 2026) - Dr. Sunniva Delacroix-Rios, Historian of state redress schemes, comparative; has published on eleven of them — Sent both pages with the agency and the programme name removed, and asked what kind of scheme it was (August 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Who put the line in the bill. It is in the conference report and in neither chamber's version, which means it was written in conference. The conference files for that session are open and the line is not in them. Of the two surviving clerks, one has not answered three letters and the other says she does not remember it. That is the next door and it has a handle on it. - Whether the eight refused claims could have been paid on other evidence. The payments schedule gives a claim number, an outcome and a date, and no reasons. There are no refusal letters in the file because there is no correspondence series in the file. We know eight claims were not approved; we do not know what any of the eight contained. - Whether the case files went under the schedule or ahead of it. The schedule authorises destruction at five years; the certificate is dated 1973 and covers 'case files, all series' without a count, a date range or a signature block that names anyone above the section level. ## Right of reply **Mrs. Ellamae Dorsey-Vance, administrator of the scheme, 1978–1985** (Replied by letter on 14 August 2026 in a single paragraph, and declined, twice, to add anything to it. Printed whole.): > I processed what arrived and I want to be exact with you about what that means, because your letter was not exact. Eleven claims arrived in nine years. Three of them came with the number and I approved all three inside a fortnight, and the other eight I could not consider, because the rule I was given said no claim shall be considered which omits it and I did not write that rule and had no power to waive it. I asked, in 1979, whether the number could be taken as read where the claimant had the facility and the dates right. I was told no in one sentence and I have not got the sentence any more. What I would say to you is that I sat in that office for seven years with four and a half million dollars in an account and a rubber stamp, and the thing I remember is not the three I paid. It is how quiet a telephone is when nobody has been told the money is there. --- 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.