beltway notebook

A tale of deceit, abuse in D.C.

Report: Interior lied about system tracking Indian trust accounts
By Bill McAllister 
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief

 Sunday, August 19, 2001 - WASHINGTON - The latest literary offering 
from Joseph S. Kieffer III has all the makings of a wonderful political 
novel, a must-read for this city's hot, humid summer. 

Deceit. Abuse. Mistrust. Lies. Power. Money. It's all there in Kieffer's 
work, undramatically titled "Second Report of the Court Monitor." 

What makes this 130-page document remarkable is that it's not fiction. 
This story is a classic Washington tale of how government officials lie 
and conceal critical information from Congress, the courts and the 
public. 

Not since Teapot Dome has there been as much mischief as in the 
Interior Department. 

When Interior's bureaucrats had problems with what they were saying, 
Kieffer said they just changed the words. 

Instead of saying a new computer system was "installed," which would 
have implied that the computer was operational, the officials grandly 
declared that it was "unveiled." 

When they had a problem over whether the computers were being 
"implemented" or "deployed," they chose "deployed." 

They defined that to mean the computers were being placed "in the field" 
for more testing, not that they worked. 

All this, says the lawyer, was part of a grand scheme to keep a federal 
judge and the Congress in the dark about the failure of a much-touted 
$40 million computer system. 

Called TAAMS, it was Interior's answer to charges by a Colorado advocacy 
group that the department had neglected its responsibilities to hold 
billions of dollars in trust accounts for about 300,000 American 
Indians. Rather than acknowledge that TAAMS didn't work, the Interior 
aides simply declared it a success. 

Says Dennis Gingold, a former Denver lawyer leading a lawsuit over the 
bungled trust accounts: "It's the big lie, the lie without regard of 
consequences to the trust beneficiaries. This is how they have been 
managing the trust for more than 100 years." 

The evidence supports Gingold's view. 

"TAAMS WORKS!!!" the Bureau of Indian Affairs excitedly proclaimed in 
an June 25, 1999, news release. The computer program "worked perfectly," 
said the BIA. 

When a skeptical U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Ignacio, pressed 
the question at a Senate hearing in September, no less than Interior 
Secretary Bruce Babbitt continued the praise. "The proof of the pudding 
is that it is working," he said. 

"...This thing was really right on," Babbitt told U.S. District Court 
Judge Royce C. Lambert three months later. "My own view is that it does 
work." 

The problem is that was a lie, Kieffer says - one that top Interior 
officials, if not Babbitt, knew was false. "The much-touted unveiling 
by Secretary Babbitt to which he testified at trial was not an 
implementation of TAAMS but merely a demonstration of the prototype 
screens that would be used with the system," Kieffer said in his report. 
The machines couldn't process actual data. 

The testimony that Babbitt and others gave the judge and Congress about 
their marvelous computer program was "at best misleading and at worst 
false," Kieffer concluded in a report filed with Lambert. Despite two 
years of testing and continued infusions of taxpayer cash, the overall 
system remains unusable. 

And, Kieffer said, it "may not be salvageable." 

The tale of how that came to be, how a government computer expert 
managed to obscure the truth about a costly, "off-the-shelf" computer 
operation, should be a must-read for Interior Secretary Gale Norton and 
her top aides. They have vowed that clearing up the trust accounts, 
which could have as much as a $10 billion price tag, is one the Bush 
administration's top goals. 

But if Norton reads the Kieffer report, she'll discover that she is 
probably depending on the same people who gave bad advice to Babbitt 
and his colleagues. "If senior DOI and BIA managers can ignore and 
attempt to circumvent a federal court's order, they could well 
frustrate a political appointee's direction," Kieffer warns Norton. 

The disclosure that the government was hyping the computer system - 
"a chimera of optimistic assumptions and pie-in-the-sky projections," 
Kieffer says - is the latest defeat for Norton's legal team. Shortly 
after her arrival, they lost an appeal of Lambert's initial, scathing 
order. Now the computer, their hope for rescuing what was proving to 
be a weak legal case, is gone, too. 

Congress long has wanted the case settled out of court. Kieffer's latest 
report will only encourage Norton's congressional critics, who want her 
to stop spending money on a seriously flawed computer system. 

Meanwhile two court monitors continue to dig into the government's 
handling of the case. Thus far, the only good news their reports have 
contained for Norton is that the lower-level BIA workers are committed 
to resolving the accounts. 

Norton's news releases have said she is focusing on the future, Kieffer 
noted. But, he warns that she must remember the adage: "the past is 
prologue." 

It's a wise rule when dealing with an issue that has been around 
Washington as long as the government's obligations to American Indians. 

Bill McAllister's E-mail is bmcallister@denverpost.com.