The dispute turns on the totals. Read at face value the scroll lists thousands of talents of gold and silver, an amount that on any plausible value of the talent runs to tons of precious metal and exceeds what a small desert community could conceivably have owned. That is the fact every interpretation has to accommodate.
Four positions have been argued. The first is that the treasure belonged to the Qumran community, which struggles against the quantities. The second, the most widely held among those who take the list as genuine, is that it records the wealth of the Second Temple, concealed by priests or officials during the revolt against Rome before the destruction of 70 CE; the priestly vestments and cultic vessels in the list support this, as does the administrative Hebrew, and on this reading the scroll's presence in Cave 3 is a matter of where it was hidden rather than who wrote it. A third view attaches it to First Temple treasure through later tradition. The fourth, argued by Milik and by others since, is that the list is folklore, a written form of the legend that the temple treasure was hidden and awaits recovery, a legend that certainly existed in Jewish tradition.
The evidence has not resolved it. Copper is an expensive and laborious medium for a fiction, and the terse administrative style reads like a record rather than a tale, which are the strongest arguments for authenticity. Against that stand the implausible totals and the complete absence of results.
That absence is the hard fact. John Allegro led an expedition in 1962 to excavate at identified sites and found nothing. Later searches have done no better. No location in the scroll has been securely identified with a modern site, no item on the list has been recovered, and after seven decades the question of whether anything was ever buried remains open.