by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – A federal judge was told Tuesday that his efforts to force reform of the more than 300,000 trust accounts that the Interior Department’s holds for American Indians have failed because of the incompetence of Interior officials.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton bears responsibility for the collapse of those efforts, a court monitor declared in a report. He accused Norton of allowing an “inaccurate, untruthful and incomplete” report on the accounts to be filed with the judge.
The criticisms by Joseph S. Kieffer III, the court-appointed monitor, were directed at the former Colorado attorney general, whom Kieffer blamed for the failed efforts to reconcile accounts her department has held for American Indians, some for more than 100 years. The department has acknowledged the accounts have been badly managed and it doesn’t know the accurate balances for most of them.
In a 30-page report to the judge overseeing the case, Kieffer charged that little has happened in the nine months that the Bush administration has been in office, despite promises to reform the system. “But the problems remain and, if anything, have increased in severity,” Kieffer said.
Specifically, he charged that Norton had allowed a report asserting progress to be filed with the court, a report that he said so troubled a special trustee overseeing the accounts that he refused to sign it. “No senior DOI official would touch that report with a 10-foot pole,” Kieffer said.
Interior officials could not be reached for comment.
Without directly recommending it, Kieffer appeared to be laying the ground for U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to pull the trust operations out of Interior and place them in the hands of a receiver named by the court.
“The court-directed DOI trust reform effort is broken and has not been and may not be capable of repair by the Interior defendants,” Kieffer said.
Kieffer’s report was the latest turn in a massive lawsuit filed here six years ago by former Denver lawyer Dennis Gingold and Blackfoot Indian banker Elouise P. Cobell. They won an order from Lamberth declaring the government had breeched its trust responsibility and ordering the department to reconcile the accounts
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