By: Jenny Mandel
The Interior Department is expected to file a proposal this week detailing how it will review American Indians' assets held in trust by the federal government, but plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit already say the plan is likely to be flawed.
"Defendants impermissibly exclude from the accounting the vast majority of the beneficiary class and their trust assets," lawyers for lead plaintiff Eloise Cobell and others in the class action lawsuit Cobell v. Kempthorne argued in a brief filed Tuesday.
In the 61-page document, the first of two to be filed on the subject, lawyers argued that the plan will likely wrongly exclude 11 categories of account holders and assets.
Justice Department lawyers are due to submit Interior's accounting plan to U.S. District Judge James Robertson by Thursday. A Justice spokesman said Wednesday that the plan was not yet available. Lawyers for Cobell said their filing was based on an accounting plan proposed by Interior officials in 2003, quoting the defense as saying that the new plan won't contain anything that was not in the earlier proposal.
The court filings are in preparation for a trial-like hearing scheduled to start in October that will examine the adequacy of Interior's accounting for assets held for American Indians since the 1800s. Groups pay Interior to use American Indian lands for oil, gas and mineral extraction, as well as other activities, and Interior then distributes money to trust funds. But the long-standing lawsuit claims the department has mismanaged the accounts.
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