<Begin Segment 11>

EK: And at this point you were paying the oldest eligible individuals first? BB: Yeah, it was a hundred or a hundred and one.

EK: Right, the cutoff was a pretty high age.

BB: Yeah, it was really high. We had to work our way down as money became available, and luckily it was funded. As you know, we went through the first billion pretty quickly. [Laughs]

EK: Yeah, can you talk about that? The appropriations and how that worked--and annually you had a maximum?

BB: Yeah, we had half a billion... you're testing my knowledge, I'm doing pretty good today for this long...

EK: I know you have this, Bob. [Laughs]

BB: (But there was that, but there was the limitation in a year. But there was also, once we got going, it was really, the amounts of money were less, and it was really hard for somebody to say, no, okay... they wanted to know why you were identifying more people, and the answer was the records weren't complete, the ones that we initially started with.) Then we discovered that the historians were wrong in a number of places, and there were a number of people held at... not anything wrong about historians, but there were a number of people held in different places that we did not know about. So, again, when there was a motivation and people to dig in and all,  there was just a lot of stuff that came to light that we did not know and nobody knew at the time. But the amounts were small enough that luckily... and the reputation, and again, it goes back to the program being administrated in the right place, just think about how hard it would have been to get additional funding if you know x-amount of checks had gone to the wrong person or there was fraud or something. And again, not a peep out of what happened, because we got the right people in our systems, and our checks and balances worked, so therefore when we asked for money it was not that big a deal as far as getting the amount done. The money for the administrative part of it, people would laugh at, that I work with now, because I'm always managing the dollar very carefully. We just managed what we had carefully, we did not have enough money. But that's what, on the administrative side of it, again, was able to use people and just have everybody work a little extra, and that way we got the job done. So we were lucky on both ends, but both ends complemented each other as far as, there was never a funding problem. You never had a big battle, you never had people digging in their heels, or you were paying the wrong people, things just went along fairly well.

EK: So I just want to make sure I understand the funding piece of it. So there was, the legislation passed, created a ten-year program. There was, at that point, money appropriated for its initial year, or for...

BB: Well, there was an authorization, I think the first, I think it was a billion or it was a billion and a quarter if I'm not mistaken, one-point-two-five. And then that's only an authorization. So the way the budget process worked is you have to have an authorization first, and then the money has to be appropriated. So you're only halfway there when you get the authorization. Then it goes into the annual budgeting process and they have to find the money against the mark that they have for the overall budget of that year.

EK: So this was a part of the Department of Justice annual...

BB: Yes, DOJ would ask for the money.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.