No progress in reconstructing Indian trust fund, report says
The Associated Press
By: Robert Gehrke
July 11, 2001
WASHINGTON (AP) The Interior Department has made no progress in piecing together how much is owed American Indians whose trust funds were mismanaged by the government, despite a court order to do so, a court-appointed monitor reported Wednesday.
Monitor Joseph Kieffer’s report charts 18 months of delays, policy reversals and miscommunication under Interior Secretary Gale Norton and her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, in reconstructing how much money should be in the trust accounts.
”The historical accounting project remains undefined, understaffed and, with few exceptions, at the starting gate,” Kieffer wrote. ”To this date, there is no documented plan for how to conduct the accounting and no projection of when it will be completed.”
Attorneys representing 300,000 American Indians in a class-action suit against the department claim the government squandered at least $10 billion in royalties from mining, ranching, logging and other activities on Indian land.
In late 1999, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the Interior and Justice departments to reconstruct the trust fund accounts, a ruling upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Attorney Dennis Gingold, who is representing the Indian plaintiffs, has said for months that the Interior Department was dragging its feet and had nothing to show for the time and money spent. Kieffer’s report proved his point, he said.
”This really is terrible,” said Gingold. ”Basically what this has said is that Ms. Norton and Mr. Babbitt, in conjunction with the Department of Justice … perpetrated a fraud on both the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals and, further, perpetrated a fraud on Congress.”
Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna said the department received the report late Wednesday and she could not comment on its specifics. She said the department has not decided how to piece together the trust fund, but that Norton is addressing the problem.
On Tuesday, Norton issued a pair of orders to grant additional authority to the special trustee in charge of reform and create an Office of Historical Accounting to reconstruct the trust fund accounts.
The trust accounts were created in 1887 to hold royalties from grazing, logging, mining and oil drilling on Indian land. The government holds the accounts in trust for Indian landholders.
However, from the start the accounts have been mismanaged, the government acknowledges. Record keeping was shoddy. Money was stolen or used for other federal programs or never collected.
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