Bureau of Concordant Reconciliation

The Bureau of Concordant Reconciliation is an administrative office of the Tower charged with identifying and adjudicating conflicts between the Concordances. It is distinct from the Committee of Concordant Reconciliation, which holds final jurisdiction under the Clarification on Material Permanence, and from the Office of Procedural Reconciliation, which serves it. The Bureau's standing instruction is narrow: it does not reconcile the Tower, only the record of the Tower. Auditors from the Bureau note contradictions between validated evidence and governing Concordances, and such findings trigger amendments — although by the time an amendment is ratified, the contradiction has frequently become the more useful instrument.

Structure and jurisdiction

The Bureau operates nine tiers of reconciliation under the Table of Nine Tiers, published in full in the annex to the Interim Charter. Its central offices occupy floors 4,017 through 4,022 of the Central Administrative Spire, below the Bureau of Inter-Concordant Reconciliation and above the sealed stairwell that connects to the scriptoria.

The Bureau shares a wall with the Bureau of Concordant Citation, a matter of some historical friction. The two offices have maintained an exchange of formal notices since the boundary was first surveyed in Year 389 of the Seventy-Fourth Concordant Cycle, and the survey has not been acknowledged by either party. Internally, the Bureau maintains a small but active presence in the Central Administrative Spire for the purposes of cross-notification and objected correspondence.

The table of nine tiers

The nine tiers recognized by the Bureau do not describe degrees of conflict so much as degrees of administrative confidence in the conflict's existence. A full listing is held at the Bureau's registry (Floor 4,017, east desk, below the clock):

• Tier I — contradiction apparent on the face of two Concordances; both parties agree no further inspection is required.
• Tier II — contradiction apparent on inspection; consent of one party disputed.
• Tier III — contradiction apparent only to a reader trained in the Reconciliation of Luminal Gradients.
• Tier IV — apparent contradiction later shown to be a discrepancy of translation.
• Tier V — discrepancy of translation found to be the true Concordance.
• Tier VI — contradiction acknowledged by both parties but not by the record.
• Tier VII — the record disagrees with itself and cannot be read to determine whether a contradiction exists.
• Tier VIII — the matter would ordinarily be referred to the Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation; it is not, for reasons held under seal.
• Tier IX — reserved. No entry is held for Tier IX, and the Bureau has declined, on three occasions, to publish the reason for the reservation.

Tiers VII and VIII together account for an estimated sixty percent of the Bureau's annual case load, which is a figure the Bureau disputes and has never corrected.

The Auddley Findings

The Bureau's most cited work, the Auddley Findings, was compiled over eleven years by Second Auditor Miren Auddley and submitted in Year 412. Auddley's method was unusual: she assembled every pair of Concordances whose clauses had ever been applied together in the same dispute and read them in the order of their ratification. Her conclusion — that approximately one clause in three contradicts another Concordance, and that in roughly half of those cases both clauses had been used to settle the same dispute on different floors — was received without controversy and has never been revoked.

"The Tower is not inconsistent. It has simply issued, over a long period, a great many instructions, and has been diligent in keeping all of them."

— Miren Auddley, Auddley Findings, Section 4, para. 2 (Floor 4,018 Registry)

Two of Auddley's findings remain in use. The first is that a contradiction is never resolved by finding a third Concordance that agrees with one side; the third Concordance will itself be contradicted within a year. The second, which she titled the Law of Shared Silence, holds that where two clauses conflict and neither is cited in a dispute for a decade, the conflict is treated as having been resolved by abandonment — a doctrine the Bureau of Conceptual Reconciliation has challenged as resting on nothing.

Controversy concerning the Third Recension

The Bureau's authority derives in part from the Third Recension of the Concordances, a compilation whose origins are disputed between floors. A majority position among Tower historiographers, held at Floor 6,120 and defended in the Register of Recensions, holds that the Third Recension was assembled under order of the interim charter and therefore binds both parties to any conflict it touches. A minority position, advanced chiefly from Floor 2,004 and carried in the annotated margins of the Bureau of Concordant Cartography's working copies, holds that the Third Recension is simply the Second Recension with a new title page, and that the Bureau's authority over it is consequently derived from no document at all.

The dispute has not been settled. On 12 Germinal, Year 413, the Committee of Concordant Reconciliation issued Clarification 44-Z, which required that the Bureau's findings be referred to the Committee before a Silent Reconciliation could be declared; the clarification left the underlying question untouched and noted, in Annex 3, that "the origin of a document is not within this Committee's power to establish." Both parties have since cited the clarification in support of their position.

Notable incidents

In the winter of Year 408, the Bureau instructed the Corridor Wardens to bar one passage on Floor 4,019 while a Tier II finding was outstanding. The Wardens, acting under a Concordance that had been amended twice since their appointment, barred the passage in the opposite direction. Two auditors were detained for four days in a stairwell before the error was traced; the surviving memorandum describes the delay as "procedural." Rule 6 of the Wardens' standing orders, which now requires that a barring order name the floor at both ends, dates from this incident.

In Year 411, the Bureau reported a contradiction between its own standing instruction and a citation held by the Bureau of Dimensional Reconciliation, and referred the matter to itself. The internal adjudication took three years. When it concluded, it found that no contradiction existed, that the original report had been filed under an incorrect floor number, and that the original report could not be withdrawn because the withdrawal would itself constitute a finding. It remains on the register.

Practical notes

The Bureau registers all incoming findings at the east desk on Floor 4,017. Petitioners are asked not to bring more than one Concordance at a time, as the desk is small and the clerks work seated. Findings submitted after the third bell are dated the following day, which on several historical occasions has altered the outcome of the Tier assigned.

The Bureau publishes its proceedings irregularly, in fascicles bound to no fixed schedule, and its last complete register closes at Year 413, mid-cycle. The Bureau has not announced a date for the next.