by Editorial
The Press-Enterprise
What's it going to take to make the Interior Department get
serious about missing Indian trust funds?
Hard to say. Look what's happened in just the last week: A
federal judge in Washington ordered Interior Secretary Gale
Norton to show why she should not be held in contempt for
failure to make a serious run at the problem. It was disclosed
that the same judge had authorized a computer expert to hack
into the trust fund computer system, and that he'd done it --
creating a false account, altering another -- without being
detected and with "deplorable and inexcusable" ease. And it was
revealed that a special master, appointed by the judge to
investigate the funds, has called on the judge to seize control
of the whole system.
Really: What's up with this? Some of these trust funds are over
a century old. They hold the money owed to tribes and
individuals for the sale of resources -- oil, gas, timber --
from reservation lands. They should have held billions of
dollars. Complaints from tribes have been mounting for a decade
that hundreds of millions of dollars seemed to have disappeared.
Nothing happened until 1996, when Elouise Cobell, a Blackfoot
tribe member from Montana, filed suit. Revelations have cascaded
out of the case -- and federal authorities have done almost
nothing about it.
The computer hacker's report was damning not just because of the
ease of the intrusion, but because the federal judge first
expressed alarm about inadequate protection of this system two
years ago. It's one of the many things that would already have
been under active review and remedy had anybody at Interior,
from Secretary Norton down, attacked the problem with due
diligence.
There are a lot of problems here, but this one seems more and
more apparent. It's time to get the civil auditors out of this
mess, and the criminal investigators in.
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