Interior-BIA Have Long Way To Go To Put Things Right
Indian Country Today
October 4, 2000
The head of the BIA, Kevin Gover, has received nationwide publicity for his tearful apology on behalf of his own agency – his “heartfelt triumph,’ as your headline put it – but Native people should be aware that the Interior Department and the BIA have a long way to go to set things right, especially regarding the system of individual Indian trust accounts.
In Cobell vs. Babbitt – a class action lawsuit filed to force Interior to clean up the accounts and to account for missing billions of dollars due approximately 500,000 Native Americans – the federal government and Mr. Gover have fought the plaintiffs every inch of the way. They defended the indefensible, protected bureaucratic turf, ignored court orders, misled a federal judge, retaliated against a courageous BIA employee who told the truth and – worst of all – postponed the day when the Indian trust accounts will be run in an efficient, professional manner.
It was Mr. Gover and his boss, Interior Secretary Babbitt, who were found in contempt of court and fined $600,000 by a federal judge in 1999 for ignoring court orders to produce records and documents in the case, aimed at fixing what the judge called “fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.”
While the historical roots of this mess are deep ones, Native people should not assume that the BIA’s current leadership in Washington is implementing a speedy solution, either. In fact, it has taken a 1994 act of Congress (under the leadership of the late Rep. Mike Synar of Oklahoma) and four and a half years of slow, expensive litigation to budge Interior and the BIA in the direction of reform at all.
The wonder is not that Native people don’t expect the best from interior and the BIA, but that we expect anything at all. Some written records from the case, plus a recent report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, help show why.
At an April 4, hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said that despite the government’s assurances that trust reform was moving along “steadily and with growing momentum,” he had learned otherwise from a contractor hired to help install a new computerized data management system for the trust accounts. As the contractor testified:
“I have observed that systems applications fail on a daily basis. ISSDA reports to the Treasury Department have not worked since at least January. There currently exist no published standards or procedures. Metrics are lacking for measuring application code changes…There exist no run books for the data center, and to my knowledge, Unysis software has not been updated since installation two years ago.
You don’t need to know all the computer lingo to get the idea. A little later in the hearing, Judge Lamberth summed things up this way: “This entire fiasco is vivid proof to this Court that Secretary Babbitt and Assistant Secretary Gover have still failed to make the kind of efforts that are going to be required to ever make trust reform a reality… .
“I will say again what I’ve said before, the 300,000 Indian plaintiffs deserve better than they’re getting from the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in this case.”
In September, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported to the U.S. Senate that some progress has been made in the new computer system (called TAAMS, for Trust Asset and Accounting Management System). But, as the report makes clear, “progress” is a relative term.
“In April and July of 1999 (a period when Interior and BIA were assuring Judge Lamberth that improvements were under way) we reported that Interior did not follow sound acquisition management practices in the early stages …”
“… as a result of its poor planning, it [Interior] could not ensure that TAAMS would cost effectively meet trust management needs…”
“In more recent briefings … we reported that Interior was not following sound practices in conducting system and user acceptance tests for TAAMS…”
Interior has recently taken some “good steps,” GAO said. “However, there are a number of major business and technical challenges that still put the TAAMS effort at considerable risk. ”
“As Interior continued developing and testing TAAMS, we identified additional problems and briefed your staffs on our observations in January and May 2000. Namely, we found that there were serious flaws in the way Interior was planning and conducting its system tests …”
In particular, test plans were flawed because they were designed with the assumption that no errors would be found.”
Now the good news from the GAO:
“Overall, officials responsible for TAAMS have begun to recognize the importance of following disciplined system acquisition, development, and testing processes, which include developing thorough and realistic plans and schedules, following structured approaches to determining requirements and conducting tests, and independently assessing work being performed on the system.”
This is the kind of fine-print image that Interior and BIA are not eager to promote, to the rest of us living in Indian country.
The head of the BIA is right in saying that that the United States government owes a special obligation to Native peoples, which it has failed miserably to fulfill. But it is the ongoing conduct of the current interior and BIA leadership – as much as Mr. Gover’s apology- that would bring tears to the eyes of American Indians, if they had a chance to read the record.
– Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff, Browning, Mont.
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