Monitor faults Indian trust reforms

By Bill Miller

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Interior Department has failed to correct record-keeping problems plaguing a trust fund the government maintains for 300,000 American Indians, and the current management team appears unable or unwilling to get the job done, a court-appointed monitor said Monday.

The monitor said Interior’s managers, in a series of quarterly reports to a federal judge that maintained progress was being made, "failed to provide a truthful, accurate and complete picture" of the status of reforms.

The monitor, Joseph Kieffer III, said Interior Secretary Gale Norton must share responsibility for trust fund problems — even though they were decades in the making and Norton assumed office only in January — because Norton continues to rely upon the guidance of the same longtime managers who have had years to fix the system.

"The cry that ‘It didn’t happen on our watch’ can no longer provide a defense for this administration," Kieffer said Monday in a 43-page report submitted to U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth.

Lamberth is presiding over a lawsuit filed by American Indians that accuses the federal government of inadequate record-keeping, mismanagement and neglect. After a trial in 1999, Lamberth ordered reforms, but he stopped short of putting the system in the hands of an outside receiver, saying officials deserved one more chance.

Lawyers for the American Indians said they now will ask Lamberth to put a receiver in charge.

"This report sets the groundwork and makes the case for why a receiver is necessary," said Keith Harper, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys. "You need to have a manager in there who can put them on the correct course to finally get trust reform done."

The trust accounts were created more than 100 years ago to compensate American Indians for use of their land. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, an arm of the Interior Department, is responsible for maintaining land and title records covering about 11 million acres of land. Royalties from the sale of petroleum, timber and other resources on these lands go into the trust fund accounts, generating about $500 million a year.

A centerpiece of the reform effort is a new computer network that is supposed to track titles, trust accounts and income coming from about 170,000 tracts of land. Kieffer issued a report last month that said the computer project is behind schedule and might never work. Even if it does, Kieffer said Monday, the quality of the automated system depends on the accuracy of the records that go into it. He noted that officials promised two years ago to "clean up" or correct records kept at nearly 100 offices.

"Garbage in will mean garbage out," Kieffer said. "The data must be accurate, complete and usable."

Only a small fraction of work has been completed in the past 18 months, Kieffer said. An average of one land tract a day is logged into the computer, and even that data is suspect, he said. Saying "the math speaks for itself," Kieffer warned there is little hope that the reform efforts will be completed in the near future, and he faulted Interior managers for not providing enough know-how and direction.

Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna said officials hadn’t had a chance to fully review Kieffer’s report but added, "This administration believes that we are taking the appropriate steps to move forward on comprehensive trust reform."

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