Editorial: Paying long overdue bill

Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007 | 7:03 a.m.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that the Interior Department give Congress a firm plan and timetable for reforming the government's system of paying American Indian tribes for the natural resources taken from tribal lands.

In its report released Monday, the GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress, says that the Interior Department has made some strides since a 1994 law mandated that it reform the system of paying royalties for the oil, gas, timber and other natural resources taken from tribal lands.

But information still hasn't been verified for many of the leases, the GAO says. And the department has failed to submit a timetable for how long the remaining reforms will take to complete and has not developed a plan for how much federal staff and funding will be needed to operate the reformed system.

American Indian tribes and the Interior Department have been arguing for decades over what could be billions of dollars in unpaid federal royalties. An 1887 law established a trust fund for collecting the payments, but many of the accounting records were lost and payments were not made. Compounding the problem is the fact that the Interior Department did not until recently adequately secure the trust's computer system, leaving it vulnerable to hackers.

In 1996 American Indians filed a class action lawsuit to recover past losses. They say that the government owes the trust account about $27.5 billion in unpaid royalties. Interior Department officials acknowledge the accounting errors but say that the figure is much lower. That lawsuit is ongoing.

Federal officials cannot afford to drag their feet any longer on implementing these reforms that have been required since 1994. The Interior Department's failure to clean up this accounting system harkens back to the broken treaties and governmental abuses of American Indians of the 19th century. While federal officials cannot travel back in time to make amends, they must make sure these royalty payments are fair and accurate now and in the future.