Virtually beyond dispute is the fact that the U.S. Department of the Interior badly mismanaged resource-royalty accounts held in trust for American Indians. The only real question is how much money the government owes them.
Coming up with a figure most likely will fall to negotiators, not accountants.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last week overruled a federal judge who had ordered Interior officials to conduct, using methods he dictated, a complete accounting of royalties collected and paid out over the past 120 years. Even if it were possible to conduct such a historical accounting with so many of the records missing or incomplete, doing so would cost an estimated $13 billion. At the rate Congress has been funding the effort, that accounting would take 200 years to complete. Even then, the results likely would be subject to dispute.
The accounts in question involve resource royalty payments to individual Indians for often fractional ownership of lands held in trust by the federal government. Many of those accounts are small. In sum, however, the amount of money lost, misplaced and outright stolen over the decades likely runs into tens of billions of dollars. Indians suing the government, led by Elouise Cobell of Montana, this year offered to settle for $27.5 billion.
At least two bills in Congress propose resolving the issue with a negotiated settlement, although neither pegs the price. Since any settlement would have to be agreed to and paid by Congress, the matter is as much political as it is legal.
Better to invest problem-solving efforts into achieving an equitable settlement than attempting to attain what's likely impossible - a precise accounting. Better, too, to spend the money compensating account holders than to pay $13 billion to accountants trying to figure out to the penny how much each individual is owed. All of us - Indian account holders and taxpayers - will come out ahead by sticking with round numbers, rounding up when in doubt.
Part of any settlement legislation should also include provisions to get the federal government out of the trustee business. It makes no more sense for the Department of the Interior to play this role than it does for the Interior to manage your mutual funds or Individual Retirement Accounts. Part of the Indian trust fund fiasco likely involves corruption and incompetence. But part of it just as well can be attributed to the federal government doing something it isn't designed to do and never was intended to do - manage individual citizens' money.
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