Court says Indian money accounting impossible

AP writer Jennifer Talhelm reports that “A federal appeals court decided Tuesday that it was unreasonable to require a detailed historical accounting of money the government has been managing for American Indians, saying the bookkeeping chore would “take 200 years.”" Here are some excerpts:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the government and the American Indians in their effort to block a lower court’s order for the tally of money owed them.

The accounting had been ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing a class-action lawsuit in which thousands of American Indians claim they were cheated out of more than $100 billion in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.

[…]

The issue of how to determine what is owed the American Indians has gone back and forth from Lamberth to the appeals court during the nearly 10 years since Blackfeet Indian Elouise Cobell filed the lawsuit.

An 1887 law allotted land to individual American Indians and provided that the government would hold the land and any revenue from it in trust for them and for their survivors. For 20 years before Cobell sued, several reports criticized the government’s management. In 1994, Congress ordered that the money be accounted for.

[…]

Lamberth has excoriated the government’s treatment of the plaintiffs in past decisions. This fall, he ordered the Interior Department to disconnect all computer systems with access to American Indian accounts. He said the department’s security was so bad, hackers could easily manipulate the data. The appeals court granted the department a reprieve so it could appeal.

Earlier this year, “the plaintiffs offered to settle the case for $27.5 billion” but lawmakers in the House and Senate said the amount was too high.