Disk Utility: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

Hello, Disk Utility. You’re usually a great tool. Not today. All I wanted to do was Verify Disk Permissions and you would immediately spit back at me:

Error detected while verifying/repairing permissions on disk4s2 Server HD: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

There were no physical disk errors reported and I just had a gut feeling that there was something else going on.

Turns out, there was. /Library/Receipts. This directory is incredibly hard to find documentation on, which is why I’m writing about it here.

The problem:
Permissions for the entire Disk Utility receipts directory structure was wrong causing it to error immediately upon check.

ls -l /Library/Receipts
drwxr-xr-x 31 axl admin 1054 Nov 23 13:41 boms
drwxr-xr-x 3 axl admin 102 Jan 12 16:50 db

The fix:
Recursively give the boms & db folders the right permissions.

chown -R _installer:wheel /Library/Receipts/boms
chown -R _installer:admin /Library/Receipts/db

ls -l /Library/Receipts
drwxr-xr-x 31 _installer wheel 1054 Nov 23 13:41 boms
drwxr-xr-x 3 _installer admin 102 Jan 13 10:46 db