In October 2007, as questions mounted about the state of the Orthodox Church in America's finances, its Holy Synod of Bishops and Metropolitan Council jointly created a Special Investigating Committee to examine what had happened at the church's central administrative office, the Chancery. Chaired by Bishop Benjamin of San Francisco and the West, the Committee spent nearly a year on the inquiry: 44 interviews, more than 10,000 pages of documents reviewed, and more than 4,000 hours of collective work.
The Committee presented its findings to a joint session of the Synod and the Council on 3 September 2008. It confirmed that church leaders had personally squandered millions of dollars of church funds or had participated in covering up the diversion of that money. At the center of the report was Robert S. Kondratick, the church's former chancellor, who had already been deposed from the priesthood by the Holy Synod on 31 July 2007. The Committee found that Kondratick held significant power over members of the Synod through his knowledge of what the report called their personal moral failings, including chemical addictions and sexual improprieties, and both of the church's Metropolitans affirmed that he held material of a sexual nature about each of them that could be used to blackmail them.
This is a finding of financial mismanagement and of adult-level moral impropriety used for leverage within the church's own governance, not a finding of the sexual abuse of a child, and this atlas records it under that distinction. Kondratick remained deposed from the priesthood after the report's publication. What financial controls, if any, the OCA adopted afterward has not been verified by this atlas, and remains an open question for a future pass.