FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 16, 2001
www.indiantrust.com


SECRETARY NORTON'S REPORT TO COURT ON TRUST REFORM LABELED "UNTRUTHFUL, 
INACCURATE, INCOMPLETE"

Court Monitor: "No Senior Interior Official Would Touch That Report With 
a 10-Foot Pole"

WASHINGTON, D.C.  - A court-appointed federal monitor charged today 
that a report on supposed Indian trust reform progress submitted last 
month by Interior Secretary Gale Norton to a federal judge is 
"untruthful" and that her department's internal process to verify the 
accuracy of the report was a "charade."

In a highly critical assessment posted today on the U.S. District Court 
web site here, Court Monitor Joseph S. Kieffer III declared that 
Interior's court-ordered trust reform effort "is broken and has not been 
and may not be capable of repair by the Interior defendants."

Kieffer also charged that numerous Interior officials - including a 
presidential appointee, Special Trustee Thomas Slonaker - had refused to 
attest to the truthfulness of the report submitted by Norton to the court, 
despite repeated attempts by the Secretary, Interior's Solicitor, the top 
lawyer in the department, and the Secretary's Counselor to intimidate them 
into certifying the false information as accurate.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered the Interior secretary in 
1999 to submit quarterly reports to the court on the department's efforts 
to reform the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust. Interior and Justice 
Department lawyers filed the latest report a month late, Kieffer noted, 
while they struggled to persuade Interior officials to certify that the 
report was accurate.

Certifying to a federal judge that portions of the most recent report 
were truthful, said a memo by Interior officials who refused to sign 
their names, would "border on the foolhardy."

In fact, Kieffer concluded, severe management problems inherited by 
Norton "remain and, if anything, have increased in severity."

In earlier reports to Judge Lamberth, Kieffer has stressed that Interior's 
efforts at data clean-up - a key component of trust reform - have "no 
hope of near-term completion," that a highly touted new computer system 
does not work and may never work, and that a so-called "statistical 
sampling" plan to account for missing revenues owed to Indians was still 
at "ground zero." This is after $614 million appropriated by Congress for 
trust reform in the past five years has been wasted by the Interior 
secretary.

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