FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE www.indiantrust.com

September 17, 2001


COURT MONITOR FINDS BIA TRUST DATA CLEANUP IN "DISARRAY"

Interior's "Dissembling" Quarterly Reports Designed to Mislead Judge 
Lamberth;
Clean-up Completion May Take Decades


WASHINGTON, D.C. - Data clean-up - a critical component of court-ordered 
reform of the individual Indian trust - is in disarray and decades behind 
schedule, the victim of widespread mismanagement by past and present 
senior officials of the Interior Department and the BIA who have filed 
false reports with the court to cover up their failures, a 
court-appointed federal monitor reported today.

"Without a major reorganization" of the BIA project, "data cleanup and 
trust reform have no hope of near-term completion," the monitor said. 

The report is the third by the monitor, Joseph S. Kieffer III, since he 
was appointed in April by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth to assess 
Interior's progress. The first two reports also castigated Interior, the 
BIA, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and former secretary Bruce Babbitt 
for failing to move forward on trust reform and lying to the court and 
Congress about it.

"Interior lacks the competence, the will and the credibility to run the 
trust, and Kieffer's reports prove it," said Elouise Cobell, the lead 
plaintiff in Cobell v. Norton. "Trust reform will start to happen on the 
day when the court appoints a receiver and gets the trust out of Interior'
s hands."

Interior's newly created Office of Historical Accounting recently 
announced a "blueprint" for a plan it said will comply with court orders 
to tell individual Indian account holders what the federal government has 
done with billions in revenues from Indian-owned lands. "That blueprint 
doesn't even mention these massive problems with data cleanup," said 
Cobell. "It just blithely assumes that all's well."

In one example cited by Kieffer, BIA employees have been able to clean 
up data for an average of one tract of land per day in BIA's Alaska 
Region, and so far have completed 5 percent of the 18,000 Indian-owned 
tracts. "The math speaks for itself," Kieffer said. He said it could be 
decades before BIA completes the task throughout Indian Country.

Kieffer's report, posted today on the court's web site, also underscored 
that intense disagreements have broken out among senior managers at 
Interior, the BIA and the Office of the Special Trustee over how much to 
keep secret from the judge about trust reform failures.     

Of Interior's most recent quarterly report to the court, Kieffer said, 
"it, like its predecessors, was, in total, inaccurate, unclear as to the 
status of data cleanup, and dissembling for what it did not reveal that 
was known or could have been determined by BIA senior managers for months 
if not years previous to its preparation."

"The failure to communicate the dire straits the BIA Data Cleanup project 
is in has been in no small part due to the reluctance of BIA senior 
managers to face the expected criticism of the Special Trustee and OST 
managers or of the IIM account holders, Congress or this court," he said.

When Special Trustee Tom Slonaker tried to point out that "the king may 
have no clothes," Kieffer said, he was subjected to "criticism and 
obstruction" from Interior's top lawyer, Solicitor William Myers, "at 
the direction of the Secretary." A letter from Norton to Slonaker, 
Kieffer added, "revealed.confusion about the import of his observations."

The report said that Slonaker "is the official who is under examination 
by the Secretary's Solicitor [Myers], not the BIA managers and their 
leadership who submitted what can best be described as information of 
questionable accuracy" to the court.

Although trust reform problems pre-date Norton's tenure as secretary, 
Kieffer said, "The cry that 'it didn't happen on our watch' can no 
longer provide a defense for this administration."

To read the Court Monitor's report, go to www.indiantrust.com

#####