by Keith Harper
Attorney in trust litigation
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The July 28 op-ed by Ross Swimmer, Special Trustee for American Indians, is as flawed as the Interior Department's management of our assets. His claim of a "very different" trust operation is strikingly at odds with all credible evidence and the most recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Perhaps Swimmer believes that incompetence and malfeasance is all that individual Indians deserve. Contrary to his op-ed, the trust management system remains hopelessly broken -- plagued by inaccurate and incomplete data, incompetent management and corrupt bureaucrats, not to mention that Swimmer has utterly failed to install even the simplest and most rudimentary systems.
Here's but one example. The government readily concedes that still today it has no accounts receivable system. Think about that for a minute. The government "manages" hundreds of thousands of leases and is required by law to collect over $350,000,000 of our money by its own count annually, yet it has no system in place to tell when a payor owes beneficiaries a payment. It's an honor system. Worse still, all payments for oil and gas are based on self-reporting. So, the oil companies tell Interior how much they have taken and the grade of crude. Based on these self-reports, the company calculates a payment. Audits are unconscionably rare and often fraudulent themselves, as reported by Interior's inspector general in 2003. Even when audits prove that companies intentionally underreported and underpaid us, there is no penalty assessed. Nearly a billion dollars has been wasted during Swimmer's miserable tenure and the trust is in terrible shape still. The courts know that. Indians know that. And surely by now even he understands that.
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