by Matt Kelley
Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) – Records on a $500 million system of trust accounts for
American Indians are in such disarray that a statistical sampling is the
most cost-effective way to determine how much the government owes the
Indians, Interior Department officials have decided.
A final action of former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was approval of
the sampling plan, projected to cost up to $70 million. But lawyers for Indians suing over mismanagement of the accounts say sampling would be a waste of money. The government has admitted account records are unreliable, so sampling them won’t provide accurate information, Dennis Gingold, one of the Indians’ lawyers, said Wednesday.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t spend $17, let alone $70 million, if the result isn’t
something the government can use,” Gingold said. The Interior Department oversees more than 300,000 Indian accounts, which hold proceeds from activities on Indian-owned land such as oil drilling, grazing and logging. The federal judge hearing the case ruled in 1999 that
the accounts had been so badly mismanaged that the system represented “fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.”
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth also ruled he would hold hearings to
determine how much the account holders should be paid for money lost, stolen
or misappropriated. Lawyers for the Indians say the total is more than $10
billion; former Bureau of Indian Affairs head Kevin Gover has said the total
probably is less, but at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last year, Congress approved $27.6 million in emergency funds to help fix
the account problems while urging the government to settle the lawsuit and
use statistical sampling to determine how much the Indians should be paid.
But settlement talks fizzled last fall after Justice Department lawyers
balked at a proposed deal, Gingold said.
Interior officials held 80 public hearings last year about the sampling
plan, and the majority of account holders who commented said the government
should research each account to determine how much should be in it. Congress
is unlikely to pay for such an effort, since it would require doubling the
BIA’s $2 billion budget for an undetermined number of years, Gover wrote in
a December memo endorsing the sampling proposal.
The sampling plan involves hiring an outside firm to go through records for
about 350 accounts. Using that sample, the firm would then calculate how
much the government owes all Indian account holders.
Gingold supports creation of a sophisticated statistical model for the
account system, using data such as production records for all oil wells
rather than just records associated with sample accounts. Such a model could
be developed for less than $70 million, Gingold said.
Congress and Lamberth would have to approve any sampling plan, as would the
Bush administration.
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On the Net:
Interior Department: http://www.doi.gov
Indian account holders: http://www.indiantrust.com
for more information: click here
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