Worker Alleges Retaliation
The Washington Post
By: Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
August 17, 2000
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, already held in contempt of court for failing to provide a federal judge with records involving hundreds of millions of dollars in trust funds for Native Americans, is the target of another request for a contempt citation in the same lawsuit.
A whistle-blower in the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ national records center in Albuquerque alleges that Babbitt and several mid-level managers retaliated against her for providing affidavits to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Babbitt’s office oversees the Indian Affairs agency.
In court papers filed late Tuesday, Mona Infield, a senior computer specialist for the bureau, says she has been barred from her office, stripped of her supervisory duties and “exiled” to her home in retaliation for a series of affidavits that exposed problems in the bureau’s Individual Indian Money trust account, which holds an estimated $450 million at any one time.
“They didn’t want me to learn any more of their dirty little secrets and expose them to the courts,” Infield said yesterday.
Stephanie Hanna, a spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior, said yesterday that Infield is a disgruntled employee who refused to take part in an office-wide relocation to the bureau’s new records facility in Reston.
“There was no retaliation,” Hanna said. “The employees [at the New Mexico facility] were given options of relocation, a buyout, or stay in Albuquerque but be transferred within their pay grade to other work. She was offered all those and more.”
The allegation is part of a four-year-old lawsuit, filed by the Native American Rights Fund, seeking a U.S. District Court trial to determine how much money the federal government owes more than 300,000 Indians after more than a century of acknowledged mismanagement of the trust account.
“We would be surprised if it’s less than $10 billion,” said Dennis Gingold, lead attorney on the case.
The historic case has its roots in the General Allotment Act of 1887, which set aside 11 million acres of Indian tribal lands west of the Mississippi River to be broken into individual parcels. The lands could be leased for oil, grazing or mineral rights, with payments channeled through the trust fund.
But the government never kept proper records and, as generation followed generation, the ownership and lease rights of the properties became lost in a bureaucratic maze.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth held Babbitt; Kevin Gover, the assistant secretary for Indian affairs; and then-Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin in contempt in February 1999 for not turning over records.
The three officials said the financial records no longer existed.
In December, Lamberth wrote in a 126-page opinion that “it would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program,” and ordered the Clinton administration to overhaul it immediately.
A new computer system was put in place to organize the chaotic filing system. But Infield, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a branch chief of the bureau’s data center, gave an affidavit to the plaintiffs March 5 contending that the new system was a failure, and that outside contractors without security clearance were being given access to confidential financial records.
On March 7, that affidavit resulted in a temporary restraining order preventing the contractors from resuming their work. On March 9, Infield said, her work assignment was changed. Since March 22, she has been at home, without a work assignment, although she is still being paid.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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