And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Sunday, March 7, 1999 http://www.abqjournal.com:80/news/1news03-07.htm File-Finding Fervor A massive effort to sort out a legal tangle over Indian trust funds is centered in Albuquerque By Leslie Linthicum Journal Staff Writer The keys to a huge lawsuit that involves the federal government, hundreds of Indian tribes and 300,000 individual Native Americans are stored in boxes all over Albuquerque. The problem is finding them. The U.S. Department of the Interior has been locked in conflict with Indian tribes and their individual members for decades about the manner in which the federal government handles vast sums of Indians' money. At issue are billions of dollars that are the proceeds from court settlements and royalty payments for oil and gas, mineral, timber, fishing and grazing leases on land owned by the federal government but held in trust for tribes and individual tribal members. It has been a mess of gargantuan proportions with peculiar twists: * The government can't find 50,000 account holders and doesn't know whether many are dead or alive. * Nearly $48 million sits in those unclaimed accounts. * No one knows whether the balances in most of the 300,000 individuals' accounts or 1,700 tribal accounts are accurate. * Land inheritances over the years have resulted in thousands of Indians receiving pennies of lease income from plots of land the size of a piece of notebook paper. * Records have been stored in boxes at Bureau of Indian Affairs offices, warehouses, sheds and employees' garages all over the country. Some are lost; others sat for 10 years without being filed. * Since all the records were shipped to warehouses in Albuquerque starting in 1996, some files have been discovered to be infested with mouse droppings. Employees, fearing Hantavirus, have been unable to retrieve them and specialists had to be called in to quarantine and decontaminate records. * A federal judge in the District of Columbia, upset by months-long delays in handing over records in a tribal members' class-action lawsuit against the government, took the unprecedented step of slapping contempt citations on three top-level officials -- Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Kevin Gover. Although the lawsuit is taking place in Washington, the cleanup is centered in Albuquerque, with 156 employees searching through records, organizing files and developing computer and accounting systems that will revolutionize the way the government keeps track of Indian people's trust money. A special trustee appointed to clean up the accounting problems and reconcile account balances has created two offices in Albuquerque. The Office of Trust Litigation Support and Records is charged with working through old records to determine who is owed what, and providing information to the parties involved in the federal lawsuits. The Office of Trust Funds Management is responsible for finding lost account holders and cleaning up and modernizing the accounting system. "The lawsuit deals with how do you figure out how to balance old accounts," says Donna Erwin, director of the Office of Trust Funds Management. "Our part of it is how do you fix things going forward." Looking backward The process started three years ago when each of the 50 or more BIA offices that handled accounts around the country began to box up their records and ship them to Albuquerque. The "looking backward" part of the job has been slowed by lost records, damaged records and, most recently, quarantined records. Buried in the Office of Trust Litigation's warehouses are old ledger records of account balances, grazing payments, oil and mining activity, births, deaths and marriages that go back to the 1800s as well as more modern typed records. "Some of them are dirty, some of them were damaged by floods. Boxes were broken, papers were scattered," says records manager Jean Tuggle. "When you're talking about little remote offices spread all over the country, every conceivable thing that could have happened happened. It's not all in some neat little folder." Warehouses in Albuquerque were closed last July after mouse droppings were found in files from Four Corners offices. Agency employees donned contamination suits to work among the files for several months, then the warehouses were closed again in October to be decontaminated because of the Hantavirus threat. Decontamination workers have been able to retrieve a limited number of files for agency employees, and workers should be able to go in and begin working again by the end of March. "We have not been at the full speed we'd like to be," Tuggle said. "In a few weeks we will be." Going forward While records are combed over to try to verify or correct account balances for tribes and individuals, the "going forward" part of the job has concentrated on more current records and finding the owners of unclaimed accounts. Erwin, the office's director, spent years in banks' trust departments before she came to the government in 1992. Her mission has been to apply modern trust accounting practices to accounts that have been in the dark ages of accounting for years. Erwin, a member of the Muscogee Creek tribe, wants accounts to meet her strict standards as a banker while having statements that her mother can read. "We want people to be able to have convenient access to their account and be able to understand where the money came from, and when, and how much money has been paid out, and when," Erwin says. Documents are being organized into complete file folders. Each document is copied as a photo image, and that image is installed in a computer file. By the end of October, the agency hopes to have all BIA offices switched over to the computer system. From that point forward, a Navajo living in Los Angeles, for example, should be able to go to a BIA office there -- or even call a toll-free number -- and get up-to-the-minute information about his or her account, including a history of deposits, disbursements, transfers and a current balance. <<END EXCERPT &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
