Computer system designed to track Indian money may not be salvageable
The Associated Press
By: Robert Gehrke
August 9, 2001
WASHINGTON (AP) A $40 million computer system designed to track Indian money doesn’t work and may not be salvageable and the government misled a judge about it’s effectiveness, a court-appointed investigator said Thursday.
“The Interior defendants’ testimony and evidence produced at trial regarding (the computer system) was at best misleading and at worst false,” wrote Joseph Kieffer, who was appointed by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to oversee trust reform. The failure of the computer system could derail the entire plan, Kieffer said.
“Presently, (the computer project) is a system at risk and may not be salvageable,” Kieffer wrote. If the computer system is scrapped, a new one would have to be built from the ground up. It is the latest and possibly the most scathing critique of the government’s court-ordered trust reform, which is fraught with delays and problems. A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs had not seen the report and could not immediately comment. In a recent interview, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Neal McCaleb expressed confidence in the system and said he believed progress was being made. Attorneys for 300,000 American Indians in a class-action suit against the Interior Department claim the government squandered at least $10 billion in American Indian trust funds.
The trust accounts were created in 1887 to manage royalties from grazing, logging, mining and oil drilling on Indian land. 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. In late 1999, Lamberth ordered the Interior and Justice departments to reconstruct the trust fund accounts, a ruling upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The computer system, known as the Trust Asset and Accounting Management System, or TAAMS, was supposed to track land titles, accounts receivable and payments for about 54 million acres of land held in trust. The General Accounting Office says the computer system has cost about $40 million to date.
Dennis Gingold, the attorney representing the American Indian plaintiffs, has said for months that the trust reform efforts were a sham. He called the report the most devastating report about government mismanagement he has seen.
“Basically this is the cornerstone to trust reform and it’s a failure and everything they’ve said to the court is a lie. Everything they’ve said to the Congress is a lie,” he said. In 1999, Lamberth held then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt and fined them more than $600,000 for failing to turn over documents related to the case. A report by the GAO last September said TAAMS was at risk due to management problems. And in February, the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ top technology officer, Dom Nessi, said “that trust reform is slowly, butsurely imploding.” thru 2001
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