Mistrust funds

Imagine a bank with a half-billion dollars in deposits from hundreds of thousands of account holders. Imagine that bank not being able to provide those depositors with the most basic information about their money. Imagine it telling some their accounts were too small to even worry about.

If this were a real bank, the only questions remaining for the bankers would be how many years and what federal prison. But it’s not a real bank — it’s the federal government; specifically, the Department of the Interior. The money — at least $500 million in Indian trust funds — is real; it just can’t be found. Wherever it is, it belongs to some 300,000 Native Americans, many of them desperately poor.

The money is truly real. It’s not welfare, handout or entitlement money. It’s money owed to individual Indians for leases and royalties for land, gas, oil, minerals and other resources agreed to by treaty, some going back 150 years. Some accounts have never been audited or reconciled during that entire time. A lawsuit brought by five Western states Indians opened last week in a federal court in Washington, D.C, and, in terms of both expense and embarrassment factor, it should be a doozy.

Indians have been complaining of mismanagement for generations. Interior has acknowledged the mismanagement for just as long and has promised to straighten things out. The trail of straightening-out plans — four-point, five-point, the current version has thirteen — can be traced back to the Carter administration. So, what is the government’s primary argument to the court? These things take time. A reformed trust system cannot spring up overnight.

At the bottom of this morass is, naturally, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a branch of Interior so famously inept that General Accounting Office staffers probably refer to any example of profound bungling as “pulling a BIA.” It also does not help the government’s case that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin already have been held in contempt by the presiding judge for failing to produce records for the plaintiffs.

Interior would like to settle this case, saying it’s not worth spending millions of dollars to reconstruct antique financial records for accounts probably worth only a few dollars. Besides, it has a much bigger headache coming after it straightens out, or buries, these individual accounts — the $2.5 billion in tribal trust accounts it “manages.”

Interior is right on one account, though. These things take time. And 150 years is time enough.