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MONDAY, APRIL 15, 2002

When five American Indians filed a lawsuit seeking a proper accounting of their trust assets, they cited 500,000 fellow plaintiffs in their class action filing.

The number was large but its reasoning seemed simple enough. It was based on the number of beneficiaries to the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust plus their heirs dating back to 1887, when the federal government began parceling out land to Indians in an effort to civilize them.

More than five years later, the plaintiffs and their attorneys are finding that nothing is easy when it comes to the broken trust. As they continue to push their figure before the court, the federal government keeps reducing the number of Indians to whom it owes a full accounting "without regard to when the funds were deposited," in the words of the federal judge overseeing the case.

Witness the Department of Interior's incredible shrinking Indian trust.

"Over 248,000 IIM trust fund accounts," was what Secretary Gale Norton reported to Congress late last month in her annual performance review.

That's down from 263,000 cited recently by Special Trustee Tom Slonaker, the department's top trust reform official. And down from 265,000 Assistant Secretary Neal McCaleb said were still active just three months ago. And down from 285,000 the Clinton administration said it was managing two years ago.

Call it Enron arithmetic or fuzzy math. But just don't call it termination, McCaleb said recently.

"I used the t-word and I wish I hadn't," he said in January. "That's not what I'm advocating."

But whatever the case, there is definitely a disconnect that no one has been able to explain adequately. Dennis Gingold, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, brought up the issue in court when he disputed the amount of money distributed to account holders during the department's computer shutdown.

"The government apparently doesn't know," he said last month. "These numbers themselves make very little sense."

According to the department, the reason for the shrinking trust differs. As part of a project known as data cleanup, the Office of the Special Trustee regularly closes accounts.

Another program run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs has resulted in the elimination of some accounts, at least on paper. Through consolidation, tribal members voluntarily give up their ownership in small fractions of land to benefit their tribe.

But the latest figure cited by Norton is bound to raise suspicions. For more than a year, the department has been awaiting a legal opinion before it closes 18,000 accounts with balances less than $1.

The difference between Norton's figure and McCaleb's? About 18,000, give or take several hundred.

"It seems like that legal opinion is another legal opinion that they kept among themselves," said one account holder.

Relevant Links:
Indian Trust, Department of Interior - http://www.doi.gov/indiantrust
Indian Trust: Cobell v. Norton - http://www.indiantrust.com
Trust Reform, NCAI - http://130.94.214.68/main/pages/
issues/other_issues/trust_reform.asp

Related Stories:
Norton makes demands on court (4/12)
Norton admits to erased e-mails (4/10)
Norton faces more scrutiny on trust fund (4/5)
McCaleb gets too close to termination (1/29)
Interior moving to close trust fund accounts (1/25)