"You kept the replies," the examiner said again, and made a note, and the team went to work, in the back office and the file room, for three days, with the home's records carried out in boxes each evening to the state car and returned each morning in their order, and the funerals of Houston County proceeded around the examination the way services proceed around road work, carefully, and with everyone pretending not to slow down as they passed it.
What the Perry records proved, and what the Atlanta records then confirmed at the scale Perry had only suggested, was assembled by the examination over the following four months, and it is worth setting out in the order the examiners set it out, because the order is itself a finding.
First, the money's path. A pre-need contract, in law, is not a sale completed but a promise financed: the buyer's payments are trust funds from the moment they are received, held by the trustee for the buyer's funeral, and the seller earns its revenue when the funeral is performed, which may be decades later. Fairhaven's accounting, designed in the acquisition years and defended in the company's pleadings as acquisition accounting, had treated the matter with a creativity that the examiners documented in the neutral prose that is their profession's way of shouting. Contract receipts were recognized substantially as current revenue in the year of sale, flattering the growth figures on which the acquisitions, and the borrowing, and the chief executive's compensation, were all computed. The trusts received what remained after the recognition, which in the early years had been most of it and in the later years, as the acquisition pace quickened and the machine grew hungry, had been less and less of it. And when even that proved insufficient to the pace, the company had done the thing that turned an accounting posture into a shortfall: it had borrowed against the trust corpus itself, taking loans from the Boyce Trust Company secured by the trusts' own assets, and applied the proceeds to the purchase of more funeral homes, each of which arrived with its own pre-need trust, which moved to Boyce Trust, and swelled the collateral, and fed the machine. The trusts, in other words, had been made to buy the company that was emptying them. Every link in the chain had a document. Every document had a signature. The signatures, the examiners noted, in the finding that would later be quoted most often, were not forged, hidden, or backdated; they were merely never, in fifteen years, assembled in one room and read in sequence by anyone whose job was the beneficiaries. The company had prepared the schedules. The trustee had restated them. The department's examinations had been postponed, in writing, three times, at the company's request, on grounds of platform conversions and personnel changes and systems transitions — the same grounds, the examiners noted, in a parallel column, as the deferrals of the trustee's confirmation letter to the syndicate — and in the intervals thus purchased, the machine had run on, at ninety-eight percent per the trustee, a figure no one at the trustee bank had ever computed, because computing it had never, until a syndicate's term sheet required it in language that could not be harmonized, been anyone's assigned task.
Second, the families. The amended fulfillment schedule — which had never been filed with the department, and which the company's counsel, under examination, characterized as an internal costing tool never intended to alter contract obligations, a characterization the examiners recorded and then set beside the arrangement summaries printed for families' signatures — had been applied, in the Georgia book alone, to more than two hundred pre-need funerals over four years. In most of those cases the difference had been collected. Widows and widowers and sons and daughters had sat at desks like Denise's, in towns across the state, at the worst desks a family ever sits at, and had been presented with amounts due on contracts that guaranteed in writing that no amount would be due, and most of them had paid, because grief is not a litigating frame of mind and because the person across the desk wore the name of a funeral home their family had trusted for fifty years. In a minority of cases — where a director, like Denise, had refused at the desk — the difference had been absorbed as an internal variance and the family never told. The examiners counted both kinds, because both kinds were the same act at different desks: the substitution of a schedule no one had filed for a sentence everyone had signed. The total collected under the amended schedule in Georgia, which the examiners computed and the company, in the end, did not dispute, was a figure in the low millions; small, beside the sixty-one million of the shortfall, and not small at all, because every dollar of it had been taken one family at a time, at a desk, on the worst day.