Effort to Fix Indian Trust Funds ‘Imploding,’ Memo Says
The Washington Post
By: Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
March 19, 2001
The federal government’s effort to fix billions of dollars in Indian trust funds is “slowly, but surely imploding,” according to a memo written by the man in charge of deploying a new computer system to untangle the accounts.
Dom Nessi, the chief information officer at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wrote to Special Trustee Tom Slonaker that the trust reform plan created in August 1998 to clean up records and institute an accounting system was “built on wishful thinking and rosy projections.”
The startingly candid memo was the latest blow to the government’s troubled program to fix a century of neglectful management of the trust funds. Nessi had intended to keep the Feb. 23 memo private, but it was entered as a court document by Justice Department lawyers who are battling claims by Native Americans that the government has mismanaged tens of billions of dollars they say is rightfully theirs.
The government lawyers are asking U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth to delay proceedings in the lawsuit to allow the Bush administration to examine what Nessi has to say. “In view of the wide-ranging nature of the concerns being raised in the memorandum and the importance of accuracy in reporting to the court,” the lawyers wrote, they were requesting a postponement until May 4.
The government has spent more than $40 million on a new computer system to track money going in and out of the individual trust accounts. In his memo, Nessi, who is in charge of information technology systems at the BIA, stopped short of saying the computer system is a failure. But the plaintiffs say the memo buttresses what they have contended all along: that the electronic Trust Assets and Accounting Management System (TAAMS) is a bust, and that the government does not know with reliability how much money has come in or gone out on behalf of the Native Americans.
“This is a turning point, that finally the United States government has to fess up that they have lied to American Indians for all these years, they have lied in court that they can fix the problem,” said lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Browning, Mont. “This is a powerful piece of evidence that tells us that this reform plan is not working.”
Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton testified to a Senate committee on Feb. 28 that “much progress has been made” on trust reform and TAAMS. Interior’s trust reform efforts “present huge challenges,” Norton said, “but there is no doubt that they can be concluded satisfactorily.”
Nessi’s memo is less sanguine. He states that the reform plan was based on optimistic projections. “No in-depth analysis was performed” before the plan was put in place, he wrote. “Instead, posturing for the court and between Department of Interior organizations seemed to be the primary influence on objectives.”
The plan “constructed milestones based on no analysis and now we are trying to live with impossible expectations,” he said. “Trust has been neglected for decades in the Department of Interior. It cannot be corrected in a couple of years.”
He also blamed the “ongoing series of litigations and harassing activities by plaintiff’s counsel,” saying they had taken a toll on morale.
With regard to the electronic management system, he said, “the lack of clear policies and procedures within BIA and between BIA and [the Office of Trust Fund Management] continue to plague the TAAMS project.”
He also said that “the philosophy of TAAMS has changed at least three times and the definition of BIA data cleanup seems to be different to everyone. As [baseball legend] Yogi Berra once said, ‘If you don’t know where you are going, you end up somewhere else.’ I believe that quote describes trust reform to a T.”
The memo was made public 2 1/2 weeks after a federal appeals court ruled that the government has mismanaged the trust funds kept on behalf of Native Americans since 1887. The trusts were set up to compensate Indians for use of their lands. Royalties from the sale of oil, timber, coal and gas are channeled into the accounts, which are passed down through generations.
And in a curious sequence of timing, six days after the memo was written to him, Slonaker filed a 72-page status report to federal district court, essentially saying that substantial progress had been made on reform.
“As of Jan. 31, 2001, a cumulative total of 182 (out of 254) milestones have been completed,” wrote Slonaker, who as special trustee for American Indians is supposed to ensure that their interests are protected.
For instance, he noted that as of Dec. 29, all new land title documents are recorded in TAAMS in Alaska, eastern Oklahoma, the Rocky Mountain region and the southern Plains. But, he said, the title history data are not yet complete.
However, Mona Infield, a senior computer specialist at the BIA, said that these accomplishments mean little without the title history. “If you don’t know who owns the land or the resource,” she said, “you don’t know who gets the money.”
She said the original specifications for the TAAMS system were inadequate for what the government hoped to accomplish. Even if TAAMS functioned, she said, the data it would process are unreliable because the records are scattered among more than 100 field offices and in many cases have been destroyed.
Infield, a longtime employee at the BIA, has had her supervisory responsibilities stripped — she believes because she has spoken out about the trust management problems. A court-appointed special master said he has reason to believe that the Interior Department retaliated against her.
Paul Homan, a former special trustee who resigned in 1999 in protest of the way the management reform was proceeding, noted that because of poor record-keeping, the government cannot find at least 50,000 of some 300,000 Native Americans who have trust accounts.
He resigned after the department, under then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, proceeded with a plan that lacked what he thought were the necessary financial and managerial resources. Babbitt promised then that the data cleanup and record fix would be finished “on his watch.”
“The government has been all along saying it’s under control. Now they have their chief person admitting that’s not true,” Homan said in an interview.
Nessi would not comment yesterday. A BIA spokeswoman, Nedra Darling, would say only: “The new administration is aware of Mr. Nessi’s memo and is reviewing his concerns, which are similar to those expressed by others doing the difficult work of trust reform. The new administration is committed to ensuring the success of trust reform.”
Staff writer Bill Miller contributed to this report.
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