The Missing Years
An elected treasurer asked SEIU Local 503 for the records behind its spending. The answer raised a question that no labor organization should fear: Can it show its work?
By Thomas Prislac, Envoy Echo, et al. Ultra Verba Lux Mentis. 2026.
There is nothing glamorous about a vendor list.
It is a spreadsheet. Names in one column. Payments in another. Perhaps a short description of what each company sold. It is the sort of document that exists so quietly inside an organization that most people never think about it.
That is why it matters. It evidences what a treasurer must observe as authorized activity in a general ledger that would never be provided to them in good faith anyway.
In January of 2025, Thomas Prislac, then the statewide treasurer of SEIU Local 503, asked whether the union maintained a current list of its vendors. He said he wanted to use it when reviewing reimbursements and funding requests. He later asked for payment information from earlier years so that he could conduct vendor testing and perform the oversight work connected to his office.
Candy Dorsey, writing from the union, answered that the organization would not have the full history he requested because of a data breach several years earlier. “We’d only have about 2 years’ worth I think,” she wrote. She also noted that the union’s independent auditors performed the formal sampling work and warned that the union’s federal LM-2 report could not simply be filed late without consequences.
That sentence: “about two years’ worth, I think.” does not prove a crime.
It does, however, describe a problem.
A very large organization
SEIU Local 503 is not a neighborhood club with a coffee can for a treasury. The union says it represents more than seventy-two thousand people doing more than five hundred kinds of work across eighty-five public agencies, local governments, nonprofit organizations, and care facilities. Its members care for elderly and disabled people, maintain roads and parks, collect state revenue, work at universities, and provide services throughout Oregon.
An organization of that size moves substantial amounts of money. It pays employees, contractors, attorneys, consultants, technology companies, landlords, political and labor affiliates, and countless ordinary vendors. Its members fund those operations through dues.
The union’s current bylaws say that it is committed to operating “democratically” and “openly.” They also give members the right to a full accounting of their dues and proper stewardship of union resources.
The same current bylaws assign the treasurer responsibility for overseeing the union’s finances and investments, keeping its accounts and books, reporting on its audited financial condition, and reviewing the fiscal operations of the union and its locals. The executive director and staff share responsibility for maintaining records of bank accounts, financial transactions, collections, and the union’s books, most of which present a massive multi-year gap with no effort spent to reconstruct them as required by governance.
These bylaws were revised after the January, 2025, email exchange, so they should not be used by themselves to prove what rules were in effect at that moment. But they plainly describe the union’s present understanding of financial responsibility: the treasurer is not supposed to be a ceremonial figure who appears once a year to lend a signature. The treasurer is supposed to exercise oversight.
Oversight requires records.
The signature at the bottom
Every large covered labor organization must submit an annual Form LM-2 to the United States Department of Labor. The report describes its assets, debts, receipts, spending, officer compensation, and other financial activity. It is due within ninety days after the end of the union’s fiscal year. The president and treasure, or their equivalent principal officers, sign it.
A signature on that report is not decoration. It communicates that the organization has records supporting what it reported. Federal guidance says unions must maintain the records necessary to clarify or verify their filings for at least five years after each report is filed. Those records commonly include bank statements, checks, payroll records, vendor invoices, expenditure vouchers, internal financial statements, board minutes, accountants’ working papers, and inventories of fixed assets. Electronic records and the software needed to read them must also be retained. A union must create and retain adequate backup documentation rather than limiting itself to whatever records happen to survive.
Prislac’s original request for vendor history going back to the list’s beginning may have exceeded that ordinary five-year federal minimum if it existed. An organization is not necessarily required to maintain every vendor spreadsheet forever.
But that leaves a narrower and more important question:
During the legally relevant period, what records actually survived?
Two years of readily available vendor data may be enough for some management tasks. It is not automatically enough to explain and verify every report that remains inside a five-year retention window.
A data breach may explain why records became difficult to reach. It does not, by itself, answer whether those records were reconstructed from backups, banks, vendors, accountants, insurers, paper files, payroll systems, meeting minutes, or other independent sources. I does reveal when they haven’t been recreated at all.
The email exchange establishes that a breach occurred and that a finance official believed only about two years of the requested data would be available. It does not establish the cause of the breach, the exact years affected, whether other copies existed, or whether a forensic reconstruction was completed.
Those missing details are the story.
The difference between theft and governance
In July of 2026, Prislac brought his concerns to the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards. He described missing or withheld documents, the earlier breach, and what he considered an opaque financial structure which would successfully obfuscate criminal activity and places the members’ dues at material risk.
After reviewing the submitted materials and discussing the matter with him, OLMS responded that it had not identified tangible evidence establishing a violation of Title V of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act or sufficient evidence to open a criminal investigation. The agency asked whether Prislac possessed concrete evidence that an officer or employee had embezzled or stolen union money or assets. They observed a big black curtain and felt no need to look behind it.
That conclusion must be reported plainly:
The available correspondence contains no federal finding that anyone at SEIU Local 503 stole money, embezzled assets, or violated Title V.
But theft is not the only question an organization must answer.
OLMS explains that its criminal work can involve not only embezzlement but also willful failures to file accurate reports or maintain required records. Its compliance audits are designed to identify reporting deficiencies, recordkeeping violations, and internal-control problems. An audit closing letter is not a criminal conviction; it is a different tool for a different problem.
The distinction is simple.
A criminal investigator asks whether evidence supports a federal offense.
A member, director, auditor, or journalist may ask a broader question:
Was this organization governed competently and transparently?
An institution can fail that test without anyone carrying a sack of money out the back door.
What members are entitled to ask
The Department of Labor says unions must make their annual financial reports available to members and permit members to examine supporting records for just cause. Federal guidance also recommends checks and balances, properly authorized expenditures, recorded board approvals, asset inventories, and periodic audits reported to the membership.
SEIU 503’s current bylaws go further in their own language. They list financial malpractice as misconduct. They also prohibit knowingly concealing, withholding, destroying, mutilating, or erasing records required by law or by the union’s governing documents. Again, those provisions do not prove that anyone committed those acts. They show that the union itself understands how serious such conduct would be.
The public questions are therefore neither mysterious nor ideological:
What records were affected by the breach, and which fiscal years did they cover?
What records were restored from backups, banks, vendors, accountants, insurers, paper files, or other sources?
Was an independent forensic review conducted, and was its conclusion presented to the full Board of Directors?
Did the elected treasurer receive the records reasonably necessary to review and sign the union’s federal financial report?
What controls now protect the organization from another loss of financial history?
The answers may be reassuring.
Perhaps the vendor spreadsheet was lost while the underlying invoices, bank records, audit files, and transaction histories remained intact. Perhaps independent auditors fully reconstructed the periods needed for federal reporting. Perhaps the dispute arose because the treasurer requested a specially formatted dataset that had never existed in that form.
All of those explanations are possible.
But possibilities are not records.
The institution and its mirror
Labor unions exist because workers understand a basic fact about power: institutions rarely volunteer to explain themselves.
A worker asks the employer to show how a wage was calculated. A steward asks management to produce the rule it claims to be enforcing. A bargaining team asks for the data behind a proposed cut. When management answers with delay, confusion, or a missing document, the union quite properly becomes suspicious.
That principle cannot stop at the union’s front door.
A labor organization cannot demand transparency from employers while treating financial transparency inside its own walls as an inconvenience. It cannot teach members that power must be audited and then portray an elected officer’s request for records as a personality problem. It cannot ask workers to trust the collective while leaving avoidable uncertainty about how the collective handled their money.
The strongest responsible conclusion is not that SEIU Local 503 has been proven corrupt.
It has not.
The strongest conclusion is that a documented email exchange raises a serious, answerable question about the availability and reconstruction of financial records and that the organization has enough members, money, political influence, and moral authority to owe the public a clear answer.
Trust is not a slogan printed in purple. It is a chain of custody. It is the invoice behind the payment, the minutes behind the approval, the backup behind the damaged server, the audit behind the assurance, and the record behind the signature.
If SEIU Local 503 handled the breach properly, it should show how.
Show what was lost.
Show what was restored.
Show what supported the filings.
Show what the Board reviewed.
Show the members.
There is nothing glamorous about a vendor list.
That is why it matters.
UVLM Evidence boundary for publication
Established by the current documents: Prislac requested current and historical vendor information while serving as treasurer; Dorsey replied that only about two years of the requested history appeared available because of an earlier data breach; federal rules generally require supporting financial records to be retained for five years; and OLMS later found the submitted evidence insufficient to establish a Title V violation or open a criminal investigation.
Not established by the current documents: theft, embezzlement, deliberate destruction, intentional concealment, a knowingly false LM-2, an insider ransomware attack, or personal enrichment by any named officer or employee.
Fair public-interest position: the absence of proof of theft does not eliminate legitimate questions about record retention, reconstruction, access, segregation of duties, and the quality of financial governance.
