Return to the scene of the Crime

"and if you dig deep enough, you too will fall into the hole over your head"


The appraisal system is really not a sound system as we can see from the information on smart money's website in their article titled FRAUD IN NEW MEXICO. It seems that the Office of Special Trustee's responsibility to oversee objective appraisals has indeed fallen by the wayside, and you better not dare question them on it.

Deborah Lewis, an appraiser with the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians (OST), a branch of the Interior Department, filed an affidavit⁸ with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia detailing allegedly illegal activities she uncovered in 2002.

Lewis's 18-page affidavit chronicling her assignment at the Navajo Regional Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Gallup, N.M., reveals that she had found...improper appraisal methodologies that allegedly violated federal law and resulted in consistently low values for rights-of-way easements used by oil and gas companies on Indian land.

This article was put out by Smart Money in 2004.

And if you dig further, you find that Office of Special Trustee has had some less-than-ethical practices going on from the top down in 2005 as shown in a memorandum from the Office of Inspector General for the Department of the Interior. The memorandum details how Donna Erwin, Doug Lords and Jeff Lords created an appearance of preferential treatment to the firm of Chavarria, Dunne and Lamey, LLC while a non-competitive contract was repeatedly awarded to the firm for trust fund accounting and risk management services to the tune of $6 million dollars.

As if that hole weren't deep enough, they had the gall to challenge the employees who questioned their actions of drinking and golfing with the contractors. Donna had the nerve to ask a really junior employee why he was "bitching" that she was drinking with the firm. So, now we move to my phone call with an Office of Special Trustee employee who yelled at me asking if I was an expert appraiser and acquainted with United States Professional Appraisal Practices. Well, no, but I can read! I'm not the only one that they like to throw their weight around with. Apparently they also said the Special Master was not an expert or authorized to opine on appraisal issues. "They" now includes an Interior Department spokesman [Dan Dubray] who is reported to have told the trade journal Gas Daily that "we believe the report is faulty and biased. The special master has no authority or expertise on appraisal issues."

Accountability. Can't we just all agree to do things "ethically?" As society would accept them? When you look at an organization's ethics and the effects it has like the effect that the Office of Special Trustee has had in failing their trust responsibility, you kinda wonder how many times "them there Indians was right."

I wonder how many times we have to be right in demanding trust responsibility finally be enacted; how many times we have to scream that the rules mean less and less when following rules has the effect of violating the trust responsibility before someone (?) listens.

So, how many counties will consent to having a city perform a survey to resolve a boundary dispute between the county and a city in the county? How many states will consent to having a county resolve a boundary dispute between themselves? How many states will have a county's preferred contractor-survey firm resolve a boundary dispute between the state and a county?

But if it 's a tribe, well then just write a rule that says a firm separated by five levels from you will just to do things the way you want them to. So, Department of the Interior tells Office of Special Trustee to settle the policies, Trustee tells BLM what they're going to do, Trustee then tells BIA to tell Tribe to pay for it and when it's paid, they have to settle for an "appearance" of less-than-ethical behavior. By making the tribes pay for it, the Federal Government has just released itself of the trust responsibility that it swears to at the start of so many of their documents.

We'll leave it at that for now and pursue this in a follow up. While you're waiting for the follow up, your homework will be to read An Ugly History, which details exactly what happened in the unfair appraisals in the Navajo Regional Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Gallup, NM. This was also published in Dec of 04 on Smart Money.