You fellows are on the mark.
What happened here is that tribal land and trust-fund administration was gradually turned over from regular (mostly white, it is true) civil service bureaucrats to tribal bureaucrats who either couldn’t or didn’t manage the accounts openly and honestly...so all the federal and private dollars that were poured into tribal accounts over the past 30 years simply can’t be accounted for.
There are no records, there is no paper trail, yet the money has all been spent, including some good part of it that went to the purposes it was intended to go to.
Instead of digging in and finding the fraud and incompetence and punishing those responsible, the Justice Department has determined (once again) to turn to the taxpayers to pay and repay for mistakes & crimes committed by federal employees.
Same old waste and corruption, same old remedy. Give give give ‘em more.
Think of it like this: Say you have a million dollars in your account at your bank and then you find out that it is missing but the bank has no idea where it went. Now the Federal Reserve reimburses you the million dollars. That makes you guilty of nothing no matter what color or race you are.
“What happened here is that tribal land and trust-fund administration was gradually turned over from regular (mostly white, it is true) civil service bureaucrats to tribal bureaucrats who either couldn’t or didn’t manage the accounts openly and honestly...so all the federal and private dollars that were poured into tribal accounts over the past 30 years simply can’t be accounted for.”
Wrongo bongo. What happened transpired from longer back than just 30 years ago, through multiple administrations, heads of the trust and bureaucrats, ‘white’ and otherwise.
What happened was the ‘accounting sytem’ was essentially no system at all - no standard forms, no standard recoring of actions, no standard procedures and no standards about record keeping; the judges, in all these cases have said the ‘evidence’ (the record) when found represented no standards and in the main was essentially missing.
The best estimates of ‘the record’ has been inferred from the records of the oil/gas/mining interests (that were given leases on triba; lands) regarding what THEY received, and the tribes bank records of what THEY recieved.
The sums ARE large and if Congress wants to prevent this in the future they will prioritize the Interior department budget so that it cannot be said the resources are not there to fix the problem and also demand reports to Congress of audits that show it is and at some point finally has been fixed.