Bureau of Unattributable Claims

Bureau of Unattributable Claims is the office of the Tower charged with receiving, indexing, and processing submissions made under correspondent anonymity. It holds no floor. By the terms of its founding instrument it is instead "distributed" — its registrars occupy desks on whatever floor the day's intake requires, and its seals are kept in a locked cabinet on Floor 203 under the physical custody of the Bureau of Adjacent Claims, which has never been entirely comfortable with the arrangement.

Mandate and Instrument

The Bureau was constituted under the authority of the Second Concordance, which grants it exclusive purview over claims whose correspondent cannot, or will not, be named. Its governing clause is unusually broad and has been quoted in nearly every subsequent dispute touching anonymity:

"A claim does not diminish by lacking a claimant. Let the claim be entered; let the column for the name be ruled and left blank; let the blank be defended as vigorously as the name."

— Second Concordance, Annex 6, clause 3

The Bureau interprets this to mean that an anonymous submission is not a weaker document than a signed one but a differently shaped one, and that the blank column is a positive feature of the record rather than an absence in it. Registrars are instructed to rule the column by hand, in iron-gall ink, before the claim itself is copied — a sequence the Bureau insists upon and has never satisfactorily explained.

Procedure

Submissions arrive by the ordinary chute or, less commonly, in person, delivered by a correspondent who declines to give a name and is therefore logged as an unattributed bearer. The Bureau assigns each claim a docket, copies it in triplicate, and dispatches the copies to the three offices most likely to contest it. The original is retained. Nothing is discarded, including submissions that are illegible, contradictory, or written on the reverse of other submissions; these are filed under provisional holding and reviewed at the winter audit.

The Bureau maintains a standing census of its own blanks. As of the last count there were 41,208 defended blank columns in the active register and 6 in the sealed register, which is opened only in the presence of two Librarians and a witness drawn by lot from the reading room. Visitors to the Bureau's desks are asked not to lean on the ruled columns. This is the only posted rule.

Relation to Cross-Reference

The Bureau also governs the creation and maintenance of cross-references, a duty it acquired in the same instrument and has come to regard as its true work. Every cross-reference in the Tower that cannot be traced to a named compiler is, by default, a Bureau cross-reference. This has made the Bureau quietly enormous: its style — the bracketed double link, the unexplained gesture toward an article that may or may not exist — is now the standard throughout the archive.

Its relationship with the Bureau of Precedential Echoes is strained. The Echoes office claims purview over any reference that cites a precedent-setting ruling, while the Bureau of Unattributable Claims claims purview over any reference that cannot be attributed to a compiler. A reference that both cites precedent and lacks a compiler falls into the overlap, and the two offices have disputed it since 4 Frost 1147, when Registrar Halvern Oss submitted a cross-reference that satisfied both conditions and was returned by each office to the other eleven times before being filed, unresolved, under a third docket.

Doctrine of the Unattributed

The Bureau holds that an anonymous claim may still be adjudicated, provided the claim itself is stable. Where the claim shifts — where a submission declares one thing on the recto and another on the verso — the Bureau refers the matter to the Bureau of Conceptual Reconciliation, which has accepted these referrals since the Third Concordance assigned it the general problem of claims that disagree with themselves. The Bureau of Unattributable Claims retains the blank.

Disagreement persists over whether the Bureau may itself be a correspondent. In 1192 a registrar submitted an anonymous claim to the Bureau, on Bureau paper, in Bureau ink, and the question of whether the office could process its own submission occupied three committees for the better part of a decade. The resolution, recorded without elaboration in the Bureau's minute-book, was that the submission was entered normally and the column ruled and left blank, as with any other.

Criticism

The chief objection to the Bureau is that a claims office which cannot name its correspondents cannot verify them, and that a register of defended blanks is, in the words of one dissent annexed to the First Concordance and never withdrawn, "a shelf of doors with no rooms behind them." The Bureau has answered this objection by pointing out that the doors are catalogued, which is the whole of what the Tower asks of any holding. Whether this constitutes a reply or merely a restatement is a matter on which the Concordances differ, and the Bureau has declined to settle it.

Its defenders note that the Bureau has never lost a claim, which is true, and that it has never confirmed one either, which is also true and which the Bureau does not regard as a criticism.