Report: Interior Hid Computer Failure From Judge

washington post ^ | 4.24.03 | Associated Press

[freepatriot32]

A federal judge was kept in the dark about failures in a computer system created to help track royalty payments that were owed to Native Americans, a court-appointed investigator reported yesterday.

Last September, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton had defrauded the court by making misleading statements about the department's efforts to fix management problems of oil, gas, mining, timber and other royalties from Indian lands. That included covering up failures of the Trust Asset and Accounting Management System.

[freepatriot32]

Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton had defrauded the court by making misleading statements about the department's efforts to fix management problems of oil, gas, mining, timber and other royalties from Indian lands.

OOOPSIE

[JennysCool]

This began long before Norton. See Babbitt, Bruce.

[anniegetyourgun]

So many leftovers that have been in the fridge too long, eh?

[thoughtomator]

I'm happy to say that the Washington Post believes I was born in 2003.

[garyb]

The BLM problem and Interior Dept problem won't be fixed until people go to jail. Fining the department doesn't mean a blood thing since it's just an account transfer from the left hand of the USG to the right hand.

[TopQuark]

Last September began long before?

The article does not address the state of affiars: it speak of a particular actrion.

[JennysCool]

I don't know what an "actrion" is, but this is just another chapter in the ongoing Indian lands mess.

[holyscroller]

Whoa Nellie! Bruce Babbitt did everything humanly possible to destroy records of monies due the Indians. Why go after Norton, all she did was inherit his mess.

[RJCogburn]

The BLM problem and Interior Dept problem won't be fixed until people go to jail

Well, tell that to AG Ashcroft...who has turned a blind eye to the lynx fur and BIA backdating crimes. Indeed, he shows no interest in government corruption whatever.

[FourtySeven]

LOL........that's awesome! They really took that date? LOL

[TopQuark]

Yes, and that aspect is irrelevant to the issue whether administration officials have misled the court.

I am delighted that you have such a great eye for typos. Perhaps you could employ your faculties on detecting relevance as well.

[Digger]

So many leftovers that have been in the fridge too long, eh?

Yeh, so who do we blame? Just part of the "Two-Party Cartel" that plays us all for the fools we are. The more they all hide the more they can spend & who ya gonna blame/ Kick every single pol out & start over & cut gov 50%.

[bigfootbob]

"This began long before Norton. See Babbitt, Bruce."

Babbitt was found in contempt by the same judge. This problem predates him too. From what I've read the dough lost, stolen, and misappropriated is unaccountable.

The rats cry about Enron this Enron that but the maleficence from this one government department alone dwarfs the damage from Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, etc.

This could easily be the Mother of All financial scandals. It doesn't fit the socialist/neocommunists agendas so the media will never tell the whole sickening story.

I think we should eliminate the BIA and sell the Reservations to the tribes and assimilate the tribes into the citizenry.

[oldironsides]

Norton inherited a mess. The former Sec. of the Interior Babbitt and Robert Rubin ( Sec. of Treasury ) were both found in contempt. The lawyers for interior under Babbitt
had some pretty outrageous excuses when asked about information. One woman lawyer claimed the rodents had eaten the files. This computer malfunction is just garbage. Someone ripped the indians off. Clinton was smart enough to dump it on GW Bush and Gail Norton

[garyb]

Ashcroft is too busy trying to come up with more ways to invade our privacy to worry about gov't corruption.

[thetruckster]

"Ashcroft is too busy trying to come up with more ways to invade our privacy to worry about gov't corruption."

I think he is really paranoid. Reminds me of Nixon.

[NewMexLurker]

..."Why go after Norton, all she did was inherit his mess?"...

To be fair, I think Babbitt also inherited this mess, although he appeared to do everything he could to make a bad situation worse.

This Indian royalty money was tracked for years at the BIA national data processing center in Albuquerque, NM. I think maybe it got yanked back to Washington DC at some point in the 90's, but in was in Albuquerque for a long time. In the early to mid 80's I worked at that data center as part of a contract technical services team. We assisted the BIA technical staff with just about everything they worked with, except one thing: we were never allowed to touch or even see the royalty tracking system.

We never understood why we couldn't see that system, because from what we learned talking to our BIA co-workers, that was the one system we should be looking at. Even back then then it was a disaster, and everyone seemed to know it. I don't remember most of the details, but I remember a couple of the problems. The main job of this system was to account for mineral-extraction royalties paid on Indian owned land, and to distribute that money to the owners. Sometimes the tribe would own all the land, but other times the tribe would own some and individuals would own some.

One thing they had trouble tracking was who owned the land. Ownership would change as the years rolled by and land was passed from one generation to the next, often being chopped up into different size parcels in the process. Different parcels received royalty money based on different contracts, and this got all mixed up.

The one problem that seemed most unique to me had to do with the way they prorated the money based on what percentage blood each person had, and of what tribe. If you were blood-related to more than one tribe, then this system attempted to track your percentage ancestry in each tribe and prorate the royalty money accordingly. And it didn't keep this percentage as a single number for each tribe, that totaled up to 100%. Instead they stored the numerator and denominator for each person for each tribe in separate arrays, and tried to keep up with each new birth by using the numerators and denonimators of the parents to generate the data for the child. No one seemed to know where this Rube Goldberg approach originated, but everyone seemed to agree that it was broken beyond repair.

I learned all this maybe 10 years before Babbitt came on the scene, and it had been going on for years before that. The head of the Dept of Interior and the head of the BIA are both political appointees of course, and I think everyone knew about the problem but nobody wanted it taken care of on their watch - much too ugly. To me, this is not a Republican versus Democrat issue. This is an example of government bureaucracy at its very worst, and both parties are at fault.

[lilylangtree]

"The lawsuit, which is nearing its seventh year, stems from the department's management of a trust fund established by Congress in 1887 . . . In 1999, Lamberth ordered the department to provide an accounting of the Indian assets and demanded the department restructure its management of the money. . . .The accounting system was to have been the centerpiece of efforts to improve record-keeping and through 2001 the department had spent an estimated $40 million on the project."

Hold it! Gale Norton can't take all the blame. She inherited this mess from her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt (Bubb's Secy of Interior). Wouldn't be surprising if holdovers from Babbitt's regime alias pro-clintoonians sabotage the system, and that's providing that the system ever work.

[The Old Hoosier]

Isn't this the judge that broke up Microsoft?

[holyscroller]

Boy what a complicated mess you describe in post #17. The whole Indian situation is a disaster. On one hand, the Indians have the best of both worlds. They're independent nations and can do as they please on the reservations, but on the other hand, they also milk our system and accept welfare, healthcare, etc. from our "nation." Seems to me it should be one or the other, but not the best of both. Locally, at the rate they're going with their casino gambling, their little nations are going to be richer than the states that surround them. I notice our local Indians are now dripping with gold, diamonds, nice cars and big houses, thanks to the casino.

Ours are probably the exception, not the rule. I know there are Indians in Arizona who are poverty stricken, and don't even have electricity.