Tuesday, September 19, 2000

Indian Trust Software Project Praised but Behind

By Matt Kelley The Associated Press WASHINGTON  The Interior Department is making progress on a computer system to better manage more than $3 billion in American Indian trust funds, the General Accounting Office reported. But the report also found the $40 million software project remains behind schedule and threatened by management flaws. Still, the GAO report is the first in more than a year to offer any significant praise to the department's efforts to clean up more than a century of mismanagement of trust funds for tribes and individual Indians. A federal judge in December called the handling of individual accounts "government irresponsibility in its purest form" and ruled he would oversee reform efforts. An appeal of that decision is pending. In the department's formal comments on the report, Assistant Interior Secretary John Berry wrote that "We are pleased by your recognition of our progress" with the computer system. Interior Department spokeswomen didn't return telephone calls seeking comment Monday. A department critic was unimpressed. "If they are making progress, if there is evidence of that, we would celebrate that fact. But we don't see the evidence yet," said Native American Rights Fund lawyer Keith Harper on Monday. Harper is one of the lawyers representing 500,000 individual Indian account holders suing the government. The report by the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, focused on the Trust Asset Accounting and Management System, a computer program intended to replace and update a web of old computer and paper record-keeping systems for the trust accounts. Original plans had called for the system to be nearly complete by now, but problems in developing it have meant that only a part of it is running in a regional office in Montana. Earlier GAO reports had criticized Interior for poor planning, such as not creating a "systems architecture"  a blueprint stating what functions the computer program would perform. The department is working on an architecture, as well as improved testing procedures and other plans that should help develop a workable system, according to the latest GAO report, released Friday. The report said remaining problems include: * The lack of written, consistent policies and procedures for the data to be put into the computer system. In 1998, the department planned to have those policies in place by this month; now they will not be complete until 2004. * Slow progress in developing security measures and other "internal controls" to prevent data tampering. * Continuing problems with inaccurate, incomplete and missing records.

http://www.abqjournal.com/news/127953news09-19-00.htm

-- Doris (reaper@pacifier.com), September 19, 2000