Contempt at Interior

Accounting failures in the private sector have been big news lately. But the granddaddy of accounting failures belongs to the public sector — the federal government's handling of money held in trust for more than 300,000 Native Americans.

The government gave allotments of land to various Indian tribes around the turn of the century, but kept control of the property, leasing it out for mining, lumber operations and ranching. The revenue was theoretically held in trust. Yet as Judge Royce Lamberth of Federal District Court observes, "The Department of Interior's administration of the Individual Indian Money trust has served as the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century." This week, Judge Lamberth found Interior Secretary Gale Norton guilty of civil contempt of court for her department's failure to straighten out the mess.

Ms. Norton, the third cabinet official to be cited for contempt in this ongoing debacle, inherited the problems from her predecessors. The government has always preferred to hope that the whole issue would go away — in part because the amount owed to the Native Americans could by now total billions of dollars. But nobody really knows. The physical records have fallen into disrepair, been lost or, in some cases, been purposely destroyed. According to Judge Lamberth, the Interior Department doesn't seem to have made much effort to improve things, creating the illusion of developing a new plan for a historical accounting of the trust money while doing nothing of the kind.

The justice of the Native Americans' claim for an accurate accounting of money owed them is almost self-evident. Perhaps the most damning part of Judge Lamberth's decision came at the end, a sentence tinged with sadness and anger. "I may have life tenure," he wrote, "but at the rate the Department of Interior is progressing that is not a long enough appointment." Over time, many of the Native Americans who have hoped for a just accounting from the Interior Department have discovered how accurate Judge Lamberth's words really are. Lifetimes have come and gone, and still nothing meaningful has been done. It is time to change that.