Indians’ lawyer asks judge to bar privatization of trust fund records

Matt Kelley

Tuesday, March 7, 2000 | 8:48 a.m.

WASHINGTON - The federal government is transferring some computer records of $500 million in American Indians' accounts to private companies without the proper security checks, a lawyer for a group of Indians told a federal judge today.

Lawyer Dennis Gingold asked U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to block the companies' access to the records, which are scheduled to be turned over Friday as a government computer center moves from New Mexico to Virginia.

Gingold represents a group suing the government over mismanagement of the trust accounts, which carry revenue for about 300,000 individual Indian landowners, many of them poor. The Bureau of Indian Affairs computer center in Albuquerque, N.M., runs computer systems that store some trust account records.

The private companies set to take over some computer systems after Friday's move - PRT Group Inc. and the Institute for Scientific Information - have not gotten the proper security clearances to handle the information, a top manager at the center said in an affadavit filed with Lamberth.

The manager, Mona Infield, also said the computer center has lost 34 of 87 employees in the past four months and does not have adequate safeguards for moving those account records.

Infield said the operation is in such disarray that the center has not properly recorded about 50,000 checks mailed to account holders - meaning the government does not have formal records the checks have been sent.

More than 300 of those account holders have asked for their checks to be reissued because of problems such as being lost in the mail, Infield said. But because the checks have not been recorded, those account holders cannot get their checks reissued, she said.

BIA spokesman Rex Hackler said Monday agency officials had no comment because they "do not want to try this issue in the media."

The Indians sued the federal government in 1996 over more than a century of problems with the trust accounts, which hold the proceeds of land leases for logging, grazing, oil drilling and the like.

Because of the poor recordkeeping and lax controls, the government cannot say for sure how much is or should be in the accounts. The government also does not know the whereabouts of about 46,000 account holders.

Lawyers for the Indians have said they plan to seek more than $10 billion to compensate for lost revenue.

Lamberth ruled in December that the mismanagement was "fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form" and said he would oversee reform efforts for at least five years. Earlier last year, Lamberth held Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt of court for failing to provide records.

BIA head Kevin Gover announced in December that the computer center would be moved from Albuquerque to Reston, Va., in an effort to streamline the agency's operations and to give Washington officials closer oversight of the BIA's computer systems.

Several employees at the center have objected to the move, saying it is an unneeded obstacle to efforts to improve the BIA's computer operations.

"Think of all the taxes we're wasting," said Lorraine Jaramillo, a computer security worker and union representative at the computer center. Jaramillo, a member of the Isleta Pueblo, said she is not moving because she must be near home to participate in religious ceremonies.

Infield's affadavit said the move puts computerized records of the trust funds in danger of being damaged or destroyed. She said the agency had no facility to store computerized trust records once they are transferred to Virginia.