Judge appoints 2nd watchdog for Indians’ trust accounts
The Denver Post
By: Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
April 17, 2001
WASHINGTON – A federal judge Monday ordered a lawyer to personally oversee for at least a year the Interior Department’s admittedly difficult efforts to reconcile millions of dollars in trust accounts it holds for individual Indians.
The action, described by a spokesman for American Indians as unprecedented, signaled the growing frustration of U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth over the government’s inability to untangle the more than 300,000 trust accounts the government is supposed to manage for Indians.
The judge’s order came a month after the disclosure that the chief information officer in the Bureau of Indian Affairs had described the government’s reform efforts as “slowly but surely imploding.” That memo contradicted BIA reports hailing the changes as effective.
Lamberth’s ruling is likely to increase pressure on Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the former Colorado state attorney general, to resolve a massive lawsuit over the trust accounts.
Filed nearly five years ago by the Colorado-based Native American Rights Fund, the lawsuit seeks to force the Interior Department to make a full accounting for each of the trust accounts, an action that lawyers have said could cost the government $10 billion.
Lawyers for the Indians had asked Lamberth to hold Norton in contempt over the department’s unwillingness to give a job to a BIA worker in New Mexico who had complained about the trust case. The lawyers dropped their contempt request Monday but said they might reinstate their request later.
Under the latest ruling, Joseph Kieffer, a lawyer who has a master’s degree in systems management, is being dispatched to the department as a “court monitor.” His appointment comes in response to complaints by lawyers for the Indians who claim the government is still moving slowly and ineffectively to reconcile the accounts.
Lamberth, who ruled more than a year ago that the department had breached its trust responsibility to the Indians, gave Kieffer a broad mandate to watch over the department’s activities. “He shall monitor and review all of the Interior defendants’ trust-reform activities and file written reports of his findings with the court,” Lamberth said.
Since the judge previously had named another lawyer to be a “special master” overseeing the department’s compliance, Phil Smith, a spokesman for the Indians, said the appointment of a second lawyer to the case was believed to be without precedent.
In addition to those two lawyers, there is also a “special trustee” named by the president, who works full time at the department on the same issues.
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