Washington — The federal government's effort to fix billions of dollars in Indian trust funds is "slowly, but surely imploding," according to a memo written by the man in charge of deploying a new computer system to untangle the accounts.
Dom Nessi, the chief information officer at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wrote to Special Trustee Tom Slonaker that the trust reform plan created in August 1998 to clean up records and institute an accounting system was "built on wishful thinking and rosy projections."
The startlingly candid memo was the latest blow to the government's troubled program to fix a century of neglectful management of the trust funds. Nessi had intended to keep the Feb. 23 memo private, but it was entered as a court document by Justice Department lawyers who are battling claims by American Indians that the government has mismanaged tens of billions of dollars they say is rightfully theirs.
The government lawyers are asking U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to delay proceedings in the lawsuit to allow the Bush administration to examine what Nessi has to say. "In view of the wide-ranging nature of the concerns being raised in the memorandum and the importance of accuracy in reporting to the court," the lawyers wrote, they were requesting a postponement until May 4.
The government has spent more than $40 million on a new computer system to track money going in and out of the individual trust accounts. In his memo, Nessi, who is in charge of information technology systems at the BIA, stopped short of saying the computer system is a failure.
But the plaintiffs say the memo buttresses what they have contended all along: that the electronic Trust Assets and Accounting Management System (TAAMS) is a bust, and that the government does not know with reliability how much money has come in or gone out on behalf of the Native Americans.
"This is a turning point, that finally the United States government has to fess up that they have lied to American Indians for all these years, they have lied in court that they can fix the problem," said lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Browning, Mont. "This is a powerful piece of evidence that tells us that this reform plan is not working."
Interior Secretary Gale Norton testified to a Senate committee on Feb. 28 that "much progress has been made" on trust reform and TAAMS. Interior's trust reform efforts "present huge challenges," Norton said, "but there is no doubt that they can be concluded satisfactorily."
Nessi's memo is less sanguine. He states that the reform plan was based on optimistic projections. "No in-depth analysis was performed" before the plan was put in place, he wrote. "Instead, posturing for the court and between Department of Interior organizations seemed to be the primary influence on objectives."
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