WASHINGTON -- Interior Department officials misled a judge and Congress about the viability of a $40 million computer system meant to help fix a century's worth of mismanagement of Indian trust accounts, a court-appointed investigator said Thursday.

The report by Joseph Kieffer detailed problems he found in the computer system being developed by the department that may force it to be scrapped. Such a move would be a serious blow to efforts to overhaul the $3 billion trust that manages royalties from Indian lands.

Kieffer was appointed by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to help oversee the changes to the trust. He criticized Interior officials, saying they have misled Congress and Lamberth about efforts to change it.

The Interior Department is the defendant in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 300,000 American Indians. They claim the government mismanaged trust accounts created in 1887 to manage royalties from grazing, logging, mining and oil drilling on Indian land. The Indians say the losses total $10 billion.

The government acknowledges mismanagement. Record keeping was shoddy for decades.

In late 1999, Lamberth ordered the Interior Department to reconstruct the trust fund accounts, a ruling upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The computer system was meant to track land titles, accounts receivable and payments for about 54 million acres held in trust.

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt promised Congress the system would be in place in November 1999. But repeated tests show that the computer program has failed to perform as expected.

Now it is projected to be operating by 2004, but Kieffer said that was uncertain. A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nedra Darling, said Interior officials were reviewing the report and are "committed to improving trust reform."

Pioneer Planet

-- Anonymous, August 10, 2001