This from the Special Trustee for American Indians, Ross Swimmer, published in Indian Country Today:
A few weeks ago, a $27.5 billion offer was proposed – by plaintiffs and others – to settle the Cobell v. Norton Indian Trust accounting litigation. This case has dragged on since 1996, and there is widespread hope across Indian country, in the administration and in Congress that an acceptable solution can be achieved for the good of all Indian people.
In her editorial, lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell called the proposal “a commonsense bargain for the government and Indian people.” In light of the size of the settlement figure – an amount greater than the combined budgets of the Department of the Interior, Commerce and the Environmental Protection Agency – a resolution to this case should be based upon facts, and the facts do not support Cobell’s statements.
Over the course of the last century, BIA employees across Indian country (most of whom are American Indians) did, in fact, distribute trust funds to Indian Trust account holders and did, in good faith, attempt to keep good Indian trust records.
To date, the accounting firms working to reconcile historic accounts have found only a few instances in which individual Indians were underpaid. And while some records have been lost, most have not because of the “do not destroy” orders by the National Archives [and] Records Administration – which are still in place as a consequence of the Indian Land Claims Commission in the early 1950s. Existing records account for a large percentage of Indian Trust funds because the bulk of the money came into the trust after 1970, when oil and timber prices began to rise dramatically. So far, 119,665 boxes containing almost a quarter of a billion pages of Indian records have been electronically indexed and stored in a brand-new, state of the art archive facility for safeguarding and future use.
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Today, Interior reconciles cash receipts on a daily basis and financial assets on a monthly basis. Beneficiaries are provided with quarterly financial statements, and we are beginning to issue new quarterly asset statements that include comprehensive information. Our accounting systems are the same as those used in major private trust corporations, and are audited every year.