by Robert Gehrke
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) The Interior Department continues to mislead a judge overseeing the government’s effort to reform a system that has mismanaged hundreds of millions of dollars in Indian land royalties, a court-appointed watchdog said Tuesday.
Secretary Gale Norton “carries the ultimate responsibility for the repeated untruthful and knowingly inaccurate and incomplete submissions” to the court, Joseph Kieffer III wrote in his latest report to U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth.
Under Norton, reform of the American Indian Trust Fund, which manages roughly $500 million a year in royalties, has been stymied by the same lack of leadership and candor that plagued her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, Kieffer said. The pattern of deceit calls into question whether Interior is capable ofever fixing the trust fund, he said. Lamberth is presiding in a lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 300,000 Indian trust fund account holders, who claim the government squandered at
least $10 billion and possibly many times that amount. The trust funds were established in 1887 to manage royalties from grazing, mining, logging and oil drilling on Indian lands.
The government has admitted mismanaging the funds, and Lamberth has ordered the Interior and Treasury departments and Bureau of Indian Affairs to piece together how much money was lost. The judge also is watching closely efforts of Interior and BIA to overhaul their management practices. More than $614 million has been spent by the Interior Department on the overhaul.
Kieffer’s latest report focuses largely on the Interior Department’s handling of its latest quarterly progress report filed with the court. After Special Trustee Thomas Slonaker, the top trust official, refused to vouch for the accuracy of the quarterly report, Interior Solicitor Bill Meyers repeatedly requested that other senior Interior officials sign off on
it.
Several resisted, and Kieffer said others believed they were subjected to “overt intimidation by the solicitor,” which he said cast doubt about the accuracy of the entire report. The report was submitted over the objections. “The secretary of the Interior has verified an untruthful, inaccurate and incomplete” quarterly report, Kieffer wrote. He has written three similar
previous reports.
Dennis Gingold, attorney for the Indian plaintiffs, said Kieffer’s four reports and other misrepresentations Interior has made to the court prove the department can’t be trusted. A BIA spokeswoman did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.
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