And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: "Victor Rocha"
Control board recommended for ailing Indian Trust Fund
By Christine Dorsey
Donrey Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Congress should create a financial control board to
take over the Interior Department's management of the troubled Indian Trust
Fund, a Senate panel was told Wednesday.
Short of that, senators were told, American Indians whose trust
accounts are lost somewhere within the department's Bureau of Indian
Affairs should be given the option to take what money they have and invest
it in private banks.
Those were the opinions of finance experts and government
investigators who concluded that the Interior Department is too bogged down
in bureaucracy to clean up a decades-old mess that has left more than $2
billion of Indian money unaccounted for.
"You cannot, and should not, operate on yourself," said Donald Gray,
a commercial trust attorney asked to testify on a report by the General
Accounting Office that concluded the Interior Department is incapable of
reconciling lost trust fund accounts or managing the accounts that aren't
missing.
"I strongly believe that the only viable answer to the present trust
reform problems is the creation of a neutral body independent of the
Department of Interior, with both public and private support and input,"
Gray said.
Mark Fox, chairman of the Intertribal Monitoring Association on
Indian Trust Funds, whose approximately 40 member tribes have an interest
in the trust fund matter, also recommended a control board.
Allowing the Interior Department to manage its trust fund program
"should not be tolerated just because the department appears determined to
prove itself competent," Fox said. "Indian people demand the same level of
expertise that the users of any bank would demand."
Gray said the cost of putting together a team of the nation's best
trust fund experts and solving the management problem would take about 12
to 15 months and cost about $15 million to $16 million -- a fraction of the
$147 million the Interior Department has said it needs to buy new computer
software and revamp its trust management system.
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., chairman of the Senate Indian
Affairs Committee, along with Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of
the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, urged support for a bill
they've co-sponsored. The bill would direct the Interior Department to
invest all trust fund money in private banks and allow individual Indians
to have their money managed privately.
"He (Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt) has been given the tools to
fix the problem. There hasn't been a fix," Murkowski said.
"It sounds like it can be done a lot cheaper in the private sector,"
Campbell said.
Some Indians oppose the plan out of concern that it would cost them
more to put their money in banks.
As part of 150-year-old treaties with Indians, the government has
collected oil and gas royalties and other revenue from land held in trust
for thousands of tribes and individuals. But today, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs acknowledges it is unable to locate records for as many as 500,000
individual savings accounts.
"The Department of the Interior has broken the trust the Indians have
placed in the government," said Murkowski. "There is $2.4 billion in
unreconciled trust accounts and no viable plan to fix it."
A class-action lawsuit filed by Indians demanding the government
account for their trust funds is pending in U.S. District Court in
Washington. Babbitt declined to testify at Wednesday's hearing because of
the litigation.
Babbitt did testify in court last week that he was on course to have
the trust fund straightened out by the time he leaves office in January
2001. He told U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth he would favor an advisory
committee working with the Interior Department on the problem, but he said
it would be a mistake to take the matter away from the Bureau of Indian
Affairs.
Babbitt was held in contempt of court by Lamberth for the
department's failure to hand over documents in the case. Babbitt testified
before the Senate in March that many of those papers are either missing or
stuck in rat-infested buildings that have been condemned.
Gray said the poor accounting that has plagued the Bureau of Indian
Affairs is not uncommon. "This is not a unique problem," he said, adding
that dozens of accounting and law firms are available who specialize in the
very sort of trust fund management the agency needs.
The problem, Gray said, is political.
"Politics and self-preservation aside, it is time for the DOI to let
go, to the extent it has not already been forced to do so by the pending
class-action litigation," he said.
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/1999/Jul-15-Thu-1999/news/11562702.html
Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
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Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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