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EK: So when you first started, can you describe a little bit about the office structure? Who was working? Who was in charge? How the whole office was set up?

AZ: So we were in a building on 1333 F Street which wasn't, it was kind of more of a tall row of different office spaces. Were you there for that?

EK: No, I started at DOL (Department of Labor).

AZ: So it had like five or six floors, it was an older building, and I think we had two of the floors. On one of the floors was the main processing, on the second floor was all the files, and I think it was the fourth and the third floor, I can't remember because this was 1990. And we had our Special Verifications Unit, which, if anyone had any issues where it wasn't clear cut, if we were looking at it and we weren't sure that this was the same person because the names didn't quite match or the date of birth didn't match, we would send it to our Special Verification Unit which would do verification of more difficult cases that weren't super clear cut. And when I first started, I was just doing mail. The program had already started in August of, I guess it started in 1988 after the bill was signed. And by the time I started, it was March of '90. So we were not making any payments yet, but we were processing lots of mail. And unfortunately, it had been so long, a lot of people had passed away but were alive in August 10, 1988, when the bill was passed, so they were eligible. Once they passed away, there was a series of triggers for how the heirs would come out. If a spouse was alive -- and I think the spouse was the primary heir -- if the spouse had passed, then there would be child heirs. In some cases, if the spouse had passed and there was no children but the parents were alive, the parents would be eligible. We did have cases where the parents were eligible as the heirs. So when a parent had passed, what my initial role was, was to match the mail up with a folder. If the parent had passed away and we got this information, then maybe we would send out a whole bunch of letters to all of the children. In some cases there was up to a dozen children. They wouldn't all send it in at the same time, but this was, again, 1990, so we didn't have some automated system with bar codes where we would scan them. They would go to the folder, and there was a guy that would get the mail and match it to the folder and hand the folder to an analyst for review. If the folder wasn't there, he would just put 'em in a bin. And as the bins were filling up, there wasn't enough staff for someone to actually go and try to figure out what happened to all of the folders. So when I started, I had probably five or six bins of mail that I needed to catch up to the folders. And I ended up just spreading 'em all on the floor and sorting them alphabetically and trying to match them with the folders. And sometimes the folders were back in the file cabinets by the time I got to 'em, and in some cases they were still out on the floor with an analyst. So I would come in with a stack, "Anybody got any of these five people?" I would just yell out names. "Oh, I got it," I would hand it out to them.

EK: So it was just one big open space?

AZ: There was two sections. Again, this wasn't office space that was designed specifically for redress, it was whatever the cheapest space that someone could get was. So there were two, sort of, bubble rooms. There were two rooms where you would just have a bunch of desks, maybe kind of like a big conference room. And the office that I shared with Martha Watanabe just was all windows, so we could, I guess, look out on the floor and see who was working and who wasn't, but we never did it that way. But it was just odd to have an office that was all glass that everyone could look in and see what we were doing. But it took me a couple months to fully catch up all the mail to the files. And a lot of times people would send something in and realize, "Oh, I should have sent additional documentation in." But that would be four days behind, and by then, the folder was in the process.

EK: So did you ever reach out to the individuals directly? Did you pick up the phone and call them to verify any information?

AZ: So when I first started as the mailroom person... we didn't even have a mailroom, but just the boxes of mail guy, I never reached out to anybody. But once I caught up, then there was a need for people to help with analysis. So I, for a while, was just an analyst doing it, and then I got to be sort of the team leader. So I would keep track of the stats of what was going through, track all the case numbers that were in my group, and as they would get sent to the next section, we would always kind of know how many we had, where things were going. And then as stuff got tricky, we had a very international crew. So some folks wouldn't feel comfortable calling, so they would give it to me and I would call and say, "Look, you sent me this particular document, but it doesn't really meet our needs. I'm going to send you a request for another document, but please don't send me the same thing that you sent before because the photograph of a headstone isn't the proof that we need that your parent has passed. I need a death certificate." So we would just have to... that happened a couple times. I don't mean to make light of it, but we would get a lot of the wrong type of document, or we would get photocopies of stuff. And then people had, there was a certain statement, "I declare, under penalty of perjury, the following statement to be true and correct," or that this is an original, and sometimes you wouldn't put the right statement on there.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.