Elouise Cobell lost not a dime on Enron stock. She's never owned a share of WorldCom or Tyco.
And, yet, she has good reason to suspect that some of her inheritance has been lost by those entrusted to manage it. Unlike an Enron shareholder, she can't be sure what she's lost because her trustee's accounting is so abysmal it's not clear what she ever owned.
Thousands of American Indians like her have the same complaint against the same trustee. Don't look for the feds to swoop down on wrongdoers in this case. The feds are the wrongdoers.
The mishandling of billions of dollars belonging to Indians sets "the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century," US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in an opinion last week.
That's quite a standard.
The government has controlled millions of acres of Indian- owned land since 1887. Department of Interior officials who oversee lots of money belonging to lots of Indians acknowledge it's not clear how much they owe to whom. Or for what.
For more than 100 years, government officials were unwilling or unable to figure this out, no matter who's in charge, how many court orders or acts of Congress demand they fix it, how many reorganizations they tout or computer systems they buy or money they spend.
We're not talking about sloppy administration of a giveaway program. We are talking about a trust the government set up in 1887 to control Indian-owned lands while promising to return to the landowners revenue the land generates. We're talking about income from oil drilling, coal mining, timber cutting, farming and grazing on the Indians' own land.
Uncle Sam is their trustee, not their Sugar Daddy. The government's legal duty to handle their money responsibly is at a far higher level than, say, the obligation Tyco board members have to shareholders.
And, yet, "There has never been an accounting of this trust," says Elliott Levitas, one of the lawyers for the Indians.
"Never." Interior spokesman Dan DuBray says the department, in fact, has just completed an historical accounting for 7,900 individual account holders and is ready to send out the first batch of statements.
"There is a lot of work going on here on all levels of the department, all the way to the White House," says DuBray. He called the level of commitment toward resolving the issue "unprecedented," however difficult, because it's "an age-old, historic issue that deals with hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of account holders." Only 5 percent of the trust's transactions were recorded before 1985, says Keith Harper, another lawyer for the Indians.
"Over a third of the ownership data is still kept in card catalogues in agency offices." Some records the government destroyed, officials acknowledge.
An attempt to computerize records wound up making them vulnerable to hackers.
So the government writes checks on accounts that have never been reconciled, based on inaccurate information, judges have found.
"Every once in a while, a check is cut and sent to you. You never know what it's for," says Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana. She's also the lead plaintiff in the class- action suit seeking an accounting for each of the 240,000 to 500,000 Indians who have individual trustee accounts.
It would be tempting to attribute this tragedy to mere bureaucratic incompetence.
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