Official says huge payoff isn't justified

WASHINGTON — After spending four years and nearly $200 million, the Department of Interior has found relatively few errors in the ledgers of Indian trust accounts that are the subject of a long-running lawsuit, a top department official said last week.

James Cason, associate deputy secretary at the Interior Department, said $1 billion in receipts had been examined and only $16,000 in errors — in overpayments and underpayments — had been found.

Cason said the department doesn't know what will be found as a massive accounting project moves forward. But he said there's no indication of discrepancies that would justify paying billions of dollars to the Indians suing the federal government.

Cason said the Indians in the case don't want the department to complete its accounting project because they would have a harder time pushing for a big settlement.

Cason's comments came a day after he testified in U.S. District Court here in the latest phase of the Cobell case, named after the lead plaintiff, Elouise Cobell.

The class-action case was filed in 1996 by Cobell and others who said the government wasn't properly managing the individual trust accounts established in 1887 to hold the proceeds from the sale of Indian land or for leases of the land for oil and gas drilling, grazing, timber cutting or other uses.

Shrunken holdings

Individual Indians once had 40 million acres held in trust; that is down now to about 11 million acres.

Cobell said last week that the Interior Department still couldn't provide account holders with clear, reliable information.

"There's too many missing records,” she said. "Documents are missing, systems are broken.”

Cobell, an accountant and a member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, said, "They've spent a lot of money but they still haven't given the type of accounting” required by law and the rulings in the case.

Page 1 of 2

1 2 Next