by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – Lawyers for American Indians challenging the
federal government’s admitted bungling of their trust accounts on Wednesday
accused former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt of initiating a last-minute
effort to resolve the dispute that has “no chance of success.”
In what is the latest in a series of challenges to the final acts of the
Clinton administration, the lawyers urged a federal judge to reject a
Babbitt plan for a “statistical sampling” of the individual Indian trust
accounts at the heart of the Indians’ massive lawsuit against the
government.
The lawyers said Babbitt approved the sampling plan Dec. 29 as one of his
final actions and informed a federal court of the action Jan. 8, shortly
before he left office. The plan will cost taxpayers $17 million to $70 million, and some Interior officials have told them the sampling will be “a significant waste of time
and money and that the government is incapable of furnishing an accurate and
complete accounting of the trust accounts,” the lawyers said in a news
release.
At stake in the lawsuit, filed by the Colorado-based Native American Rights
Fund, is the accuracy of thousands of individual trust accounts that the
federal government established for about 300,000 Indians. Those accounts
were to hold money that the government received from private industry for
minerals, oil and gas that were taken from the lands.
Congress, in urging the Interior Department to settle the lawsuit last year,
suggested it take a sampling approach, examining a limited number of
accounts and then applying what it finds to all of the accounts.
Stephanie Hanna, an Interior spokeswoman, said the department long has
insisted that “the only way to get to the bottom of this is through some
statistical sampling.” She added that there is “no way to estimate any other
alternative.”
The Indians already have won the first phase of their 1966 lawsuit against
the government. But the Clinton administration appealed a district court
ruling that the government had breached its trust relationship with the
Indians.
The government has conceded that its records are a mess and has no way of
knowing how accurate the individual account balances are. The lawsuit
attempts to force the government to make an accounting for the funds.
In an internal memo dated Dec. 21, Kevin Gover, the former assistant
interior secretary for Indian affairs, argued for a sampling of the
accounts, saying the department, Congress and “outside third parties” had
reviewed the issue of how to reconcile the accounts.
“Each agrees that a complete transaction-by-transaction accounting for every
account would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take many years to
complete,” he said.
That would be so costly that it would force the department to turn to
Congress for added appropriations, he said.
But Dennis Gingold, a former Denver lawyer who is handling the case, argued
in his motion that during settlement talks last year, two Interior officials
told him that sampling would be ineffective and would fail to accomplish the
accounting that the courts have ordered.
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