Just in case you thought that Enron could cook the books, be aware that the
United States government can do a really good job of it also. The money
that should have been going to Indians has been stolen for whatever purposes
for many years, and no one really gives a darn--except the Indians--and since
they are mostly poor and isolated, its hard to find a political defender.
Our Government has fought the Indian wars many times, and has won every time.
Of course they've cheated to win, but you know how it is--the end always
justifies the means. Prudy
--- Begin Message ---
February 11, 2002
Trail of U.S. accounting errors stymies repayments to Indians
By MICHAEL MILSTEIN
Newhouse News Service
http://www.cleveland.com
The stories are bewildering legend among American Indians: family
inheritances that vanished like smoke; checks for a few dollars or pennies
that arrive out of the blue; land they owned but now cannot trace.
"When I was a very little girl, I remember my dad saying that we had this
land, that someday we would get some money from it," says Lecile Jay, a
Blackfeet Indian who lives in Florence, Ore.
But when she tried to find the land near the Blackfeet Reservation in
Montana, or some record of it, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs told her
"it wouldn't be worth our time."
Now the legend of such missing Indian land and money has unfolded into the
worst nightmare of the U.S. Interior Department since the Teapot Dome
scandal of the 1920s, and perhaps the greatest case of government financial
incompetence in history.
Tangled in the mess are Interior Secretary Gale Norton, more than 11 million
acres belonging to hundreds of thousands of Indians, billions of dollars of
Indian and taxpayer money and a multimillion-dollar federal computer system
that may end up being scrapped.
Norton is expected to testify in coming weeks in her own contempt trial
before a tough federal judge who has shut down Interior Department computers
and could put her in jail. The judge has so lost patience, he recently
warned Norton's lawyers, "I don't believe one word you're telling me."
"This case in the last six months has just exploded," said Dave Tovey,
executive director of administration for the Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla Indian Reservation in Eastern Oregon. "It has been building for
years, but now nobody can ignore it."
Every taxpayer may feel the impact, because the government may have to repay
American Indians for more than $10 billion worth of royalties and land the
government has lost track of in the past century.
"A lot of Indian people have been very passive for a long time," said
Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet Indian who set up the showdown by suing the
Interior Department. "As a result, the government got away with anything
they wanted. Now we're saying it's got to stop."
Federal courts have agreed with Cobell since she filed a class-action
lawsuit on behalf of thousands of Indians in 1996. In it, she sought an
accounting of oil, mining, grazing and logging royalties from 11 million
acres owned by individual Indians but held in trust by the government.
Land grab
The trust land is an artifact of a government scheme to undo tribal nations
and open Indian land to ranching, mining and other uses by breaking many
reservations into pieces called allotments. Some went to Indian families.
The rest went up for sale.
"In the old pictures, you see signs that say 'Indian Land for Sale,' "
recalled Lois Broncheau, who works for the Umatilla tribes buying some of
that land back, bit by bit, at today's higher prices.
The government held Indian allotments tax-free and leased them to farmers,
loggers, miners and, later, oil companies. Congress set up a trust fund to
hold the royalties and dole them out to Indian owners.
But a federal Indian agent despaired as early as 1828 that it looked as
though the government had handled American Indian funds "with a pitchfork" -
and it got worse. Not only did the government not balance the checkbook
holding American Indian money, it barely even kept a checkbook. Oil
companies pumped oil from American Indian land without reporting it. Land
records disappeared - stolen, shredded or tossed out as garbage. Some
American Indians got pennies when they deserved thousands of dollars.
The government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, today pays royalties
to some American Indians - about $500 million in checks go out each year -
but has lost track of nearly 50,000 others. Accountants have discovered at
least $2 billion, plus interest, unaccounted for. They could not tell to
whom billions more belonged.
Even after Cobell filed her case and U.S. Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the
government to turn over reams of documents, the Treasury Department
destroyed hundreds of boxes that might have contained Indian trust records.
In 1999, acting "more out of sadness than anger," the judge held then
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and an
assistant Interior secretary in contempt of court. He blamed them for "a
shocking pattern of deception" that included covering up missing documents
that Indians might have used to prove their case.
Accounting nightmare
The President Reagan appointee ruled shortly afterward that the entire trust
fund was in hopeless disarray. "The United States," Lamberth wrote, "cannot
say how much money is or should be in the trust."
Some say 300,000 Indians are entitled to the money. Others suggest 500,000.
"Notwithstanding all of this," Lamberth wrote, Interior Department officials
"continue to write checks on an account that they cannot balance or
reconcile. It is fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest
form."
He ordered the Interior Department to clean up the mess, which had only
multiplied through decades of neglect.
A $40 million computer system called TAAMS - Trust Asset Accounting
Management System - was designed to take over the task in Bureau of Indian
Affairs regional offices around the country by 2000.
But almost from the time it was installed in 1999, the system failed. It
broke down and spit out incorrect data. In some instances, workers had to
photocopy records at rural county courthouses and enter details by hand. In
February 2001, just after Norton and the Bush administration took over the
Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' top computer manager
warned that reform of the Indian trust system was "slowly but surely
imploding."
Norton announced a plan to hand Indian trust funds to a new bureau of the
Interior Department, which tribes almost unanimously opposed as a further
dismantling of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the one agency dedicated to
their needs.
� 2002 The Plain Dealer.
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
<FONT COLOR="#000099">Get your FREE credit report with a FREE CreditCheck
Monitoring Service trial
</FONT><A HREF="http://us.click.yahoo.com/ACHqaB/bQ8CAA/ySSFAA/oOHolB/TM";><B>Click
Here!</B></A>
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Moderator: Jimmy Boy Dial
http://www.thespike.com
Community email addresses:
Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List owner: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Shortcut URL to this page:
http://www.onelist.com/community/The_Spike
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--- End Message ---
