By Neely Tucker Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 13, 2002; 2:46 PM

Testifying in her own contempt trial, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton today acknowledged that the government had lost an unknown amount of trust fund records for Native Americans, but she defended her agency's management of billions of dollars of the Indian accounts.

"The basic functions of the system are working, but we want to make improvements to make those systems work more correctly," Norton said in the day-long hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth.

Lamberth's courtroom was jammed with observers, as Norton is defending herself against charges that could make her only the third cabinet-level officer to ever be held in contempt of court.

The only other two officials to be found in contempt were her immediate predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, and then Treasury Secretary Robert F. Rubin. Lamberth held them and a senior aide in contempt for their failures in managing the same Indian trust fund accounts and for their lack of candor to the court about their failures to repair the massive accounting system.

Two years later, the accounting system that manages accounts for as many as 500,000 Indians is still in shambles, according to reports filed by a court-appointed monitor and a special master. The 115-year old government system of managing Indian lands and disbursing income from the leasing of oil, gas, land and mineral rights takes in as much as $500 million per year.

But the government's tangled accounting networks are so spread out over the country, and so poorly recorded and managed, that no one knows how much money has been lost over the decades, and who should be receiving what amounts. The government is unable to provide anyone with an accurate, checkbook history of their account.

The Native American Rights Fund filed a class-action suit in 1994, and Lamberth has already ruled that the government has failed in its responsibilities to manage the accounts.

He ordered federal officials to fix the system in 1999, but a flurry of reports have shown a new $20 million computer system has failed to work, and the court monitor has found that the government has filed reports that hid or minimized Interior's failure to comply with the court order.

Norton and Assistant Interior Secretary Neal McCaleb are facing five contempt charges for those allegedly misleading reports.

After Norton took office last January and decided to continue with Babbitt's decision to take a statistical sampling of Indian trust fund accounts – instead of Lamberth's order to conduct a full, historical accounting – the judge became visibly irate.

"What is there left to try with Secretary Norton?" Lamberth asked government lawyers in October. "Her first action was so contemptuous, I don't know what to do."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5673-2002Feb13.html

-- Anonymous, February 17, 2002