Mostly what has happened is that the BIA and Dept of Interior has non-computerized accounting systems which date back to the 70's.
The agencies involved, BIA, OST, BLM and MMS all have extensive, modern computer systems. Some are better than others, but all of their data respecting the allotted Indians are computerized.
They literally have no idea where billions of dollars are which are due to hundreds of tribes for oil and gas royalties, land leases and a variety of other payments.
Simply untrue. If you go back to 1872, yes, many of the records are missing. Little to nothing of any relevance is missing from 1970 forward, and there is no issue with respect to missing records from that time frame. Even going back to the 1800s, most of the records are intact. As for the original allottees that brought the suit, an audit of their properties back to 1909 found that approximately $67 was mispaid. To date, the plaintiffs have never proffered a single legitimate method for estimated what missing monies there were. Nor have they demonstrated any missing monies.
As for the tribes you refer to, this suit is based on the allotted Indians, not the tribes.
These are reparations but rather money which was due the tribes which was collected by the Federal government and then simply NOT accounted for and then when the monies were supposed to be paid out it was discovered that there was no actual money in the accounts which were supposed to have balances.
This is absolutely untrue. The issue is a record keeping one, not one of "missing" money. During the times when money may have been misappropriated by paying it out to the wrong allottees, it was all in the BIA, almost all of its employees being Indian. The biggest issue they have during those times were keeping the allotted interest percentages correct. You can have hundreds of allottees and their successors on a lease, with any one sometimes receiving one cent or less a month.
I have a close associate who did some software work for the Interior Dept on issues like this and it was determined that there were handfuls of agencies which could not be updated because their systems were so old and antiquated that there was literally no way to bring them up to date or integrate them with other agency networks and databases.
Details?
I've hired two past BIA Commissioners and one Asst Commissioner. I'm pretty familiar with the downfalls of having Indian employees presiding over Indian Affairs simply because they are Indians. But I haven't dealt with a tribe yet who knew how much money they were due and because of that you have generations of people who aren't keeping track and BIA who didn't keep track. The money is all somewhere but the ledgers are further from accurate than Enron finances in many, many cases. Considering how the Federal government loses $1B a year just in the IRS alone, losing billions isn't exactly lowering the bar for the Interior Department.