indian trust

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WASHINGTON, June 26 --- U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth expressed
frustration this week as the Interior Department presented him with yet
another plan to reform the broken Indian Trust system.
"I'm pretty pessimistic," the judge declared Wednesday.
Lamberth said the new plans from the Bush administration are identical
to plans he heard from the Clinton administration four years ago.
Ross O. Swimmer, the government's final witness in the latest trial
over the trust system, conceded that much of what he was saying about the
need for a new computer system to resolve programs with the trust system was
similar to what his predecessors had told the judge in 1999.
"I am, your honor, saying the same thing," said Swimmer, Interior's
special trustee charged with overseeing the trust system.
Twice during Swimmer's testimony, the judge told him his plans to reform
the system had a familiar ring.
"The people who were sitting in your seat said the same thing to me in
1999," the judge said. "...I don't see the difference, do you?"
Lamberth said he regretted not listening then to the testimony presented
to him by experts for Elouise Cobell and the class of all past and present
individual Indian trust beneficiaries. Those experts were skeptical of the
Clinton administration's plans for a new, $40 million trust management
computer system.
But Lamberth said he accepted the arguments of Interior officials who
assured him their computers would work. They didn't, Swimmer acknowledged.
When the judge asked Swimmer, how long his proposed trust information
system would take to become operational, Swimmer replied: "I'd be
hard-pressed to say." He then added it was "a good 12 months away."
Whether such a promise is acceptable is one of the key issues before
Lamberth. Since May 1, he has been holding a trial on how to best reform the
trust system.
Swimmer confirmed a $6 million shortage in the current pool of
individual Indian trust accounts, held at the Treasury Department.
A group of Indians suing the government have said that their accounts
may be billions of dollars short, the result of massive mismanagement of
their accounts and missing records. The accounts were established in 1887 to
hold the proceeds from the leases of Indian lands in the West for oil, gas,
mineral and grazing leases, as well as timber sales.
Numerous studies dating almost from the trust's inception showed that
the individual Indian trust accounts have been, and continues to be, plagued
by malfeasance, systematic records destruction, fraud and incompetence.
Swimmer, the former assistant Interior secretary for Indian affairs,
will remain on the stand for the rest of the week.
The trial is expected to end July 8.

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