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EK: And could you talk a little bit more about how the office was staffed and how the whole verification process evolved?

JC: Uh-huh. Okay, so since it was a ten-year program, we were careful about hiring too many federal employees, because after ten years we would have to figure out what are we going to do with those employees. So we started, we were able to get a contractor on board, I believe it was Aspen Corporation, I'm not sure they still exist, or they may have been bought out by somebody else. And we had about ninety contract employees, probably ten to fifteen government employees, and that was the start of the Verification Unit. We created a hotline so that individuals could also call us, because, again, we were responsible for locating--identifying and locating. There was no requirement for the claimant to come to us. So we got a lot of calls. We had, there was a bilingual call center, and we had several people who spoke Japanese, and that really helped us continue to build that base of who were eligible. And then we knew that the community was very important for us as well. There were several major community organizations like the Japanese American Community League as well as the National... I'm going to get this wrong, NCRR, National Coalition for Redress and Reparations. And there were a few others, but those were the main ones that I worked with. And we asked them, what was the best way to locate individuals who were interned or forced to evacuate? And they said that it was really important for us to build a relationship with the community, because they had tried to do this in the 1940s. I don't remember exactly what the program was called, but people were getting, like, ten cents on the dollar. And, again, DOJ were the ones that -- and working with, then, the War Department -- who basically set the foundation and set the charge for the internment program. So we wanted to ensure them that fifty years later, or forty-five years later at that point, we were individuals, it's a different timeframe, different environment, and that we were there to help them, and certainly to also apologize for what they had gone through, hence the presidential apology letter.

So what we did with the Verification Unit was we took all of these records and we created this database called Super Mario, because Super Mario was a very, then-popular game. [Laughs] And we created a database with all the names of the individuals who were interned and all the individuals that were evacuated. But we soon found out that all of the names was incomplete, and we knew that the numbers, actuarial numbers were actually off by about five thousand, which was very conservative. But we start the verification process, and we realized that some cases were a lot more difficult to verify than others. And we also knew that we needed to work quickly because we were dealing with an older generation born in the early 1900s, and we wanted to ensure that they received a payment. Not that their beneficiaries, if they had a husband or children, wouldn't be eligible, but we wanted to give them the satisfaction of receiving a payment and an apology letter, so it was really important to us. Plus, we were charged, by appropriation and by the law, to verify and pay twenty-five thousand people a year, five hundred million dollars a year. So, again, pre-internet, developing the system for verification and payment, and we certainly wanted to make sure that everyone that we paid was eligible, we didn't want any erroneous payments, or fraudulent payments to go out. We actually worked with the FBI, they taught us how to review information coming in, to spot records that perhaps were altered or were falsified. So that was a very good educational experience with the FBI at the time, and we were working with the Social Security Administration, and they provided us with records. One was like a death master file, which would identify the people who died before the law was enacted. So, unfortunately, those individuals would be ineligible, so we were concerned about people altering birth records. So that was a very good federal relationship with the Social Security Administration, they were also able to give us addresses for people who were receiving social security benefits. So we were trying to figure out current records for this Japanese American population, matched with historical records. So there was a lot of matching of records.

And during that process, we actually realized that people who were born in Japan were born a year old, and so we had to then reconcile these birth records that were different than what we were seeing in the historical records. And then we were dealing with women who had changed their name or assumed different names, so we had name matches. So we were discovering, as we knew, that there were some, what we would call easy verification or complex verification. So we did, early on in the program, we created this unit called Special Verification, and all they did was focus on the more difficult ones. So that those that were what we call "easy to verify," all the records matched what was coming in, we were able to pay those individuals quickly. And we had what was called a huge library at our facility, again, pre-internet, and we came up with a dot system. Because, again, we were dealing with hundreds and thousands of records. So that we insure that we had good internal controls, everyone had a file, and individuals who were what we called "good to go" had a green dot. If you were in "special verification" you had a yellow dot, because there was caution, we had to ensure that things were okay. And unfortunately, if you had a red dot, you were ineligible for payment. So we had this... it wasn't very sophisticated at all, but we wanted to keep things very simple because it was a complicated program.

EK: And these dots were the stickers that you actually put on...

JC: These dots were the stickers, yeah. And then what became the big brown envelope, we let people know, "If you receive a big, brown envelope" -- because we didn't want the envelopes to look like any other envelope -- so we said, "If you receive a big brown envelope from the Office of Redress Administration, please pay attention to it. Don't throw it out, it's from the government, but pay attention to it." And inside it we had another big brown envelope, because we certainly didn't want them to have to pay for postage. And so that always became a joke or a talking point out on the road, because people would say, "I received my big brown envelope," we're like, okay, that's a good thing. And then the check would also go in a big brown envelope. So we just came up with very simple processes for, again, ninety contractors who really became... they were contractors that, they became pretty much part of the federal workforce. We used to call it the "Mini United Nations" because they had such diverse backgrounds. Which was really nice, because, from a cultural perspective, that's what we were dealing with, with the Japanese American community as well. It was a lot of different cultures that we had to be very sensitive to. So even in our five days, actually, seven days a week work environment, because we worked a lot, because we had such a mandate, and it was okay, because we had a great mission. But it helped us continue just to realize what we were doing every day, just to see our small United Nations and what we were dealing with from a public perspective. That's how we started.

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