$93 billion is the difference between the $7 billion the Department of Interior has offered to pay holders of Native American tribal and individual land trust accounts and the $100+ billion those account holders claim they are owed. Tribal land accounts date back to 1820 when the U.S. government initially authorized each Native American to receive 160 acres of land to be held in trust by the U.S. government. The land trusts originally totaled 146 million acres of land, of which the U.S. government then sold 90 million acres to non-Indians, leaving 56 million acres in trust. Beginning in 1887 the federal government, through the Department of Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs, became trustees for individual Indian accounts. The Historical Accounting Project for Individual Indian Money (IIM) Accounts is the first comprehensive attempt to ascertain exactly who is owed how much. The project began in 1999 and will continue into 2011, unless Congress determines the project is not yet completed, a good possibility. 40 million pieces of documentation have been coded thus far and included in a database, at a cost of $274 million.

The end of this project is nowhere in sight. The Bureau of Indian Affairs can only reconcile tribal, not individual, accounts from 1972 to the present. A century of paperwork is missing, not counting the 162 cartons of documents dating back to 1900 the government "accidentally" destroyed when the project began as a result of a lawsuit filed by Blackfeet Nation member Elouise Cobell (Cobell vs. Kempthorne). There are an estimated 320,000 individual trust accounts involving more than 4 million payers who made more than 100 million transactions. Neither side in the lawsuit can reliably estimate the number of possible beneficiaries involved in the case.

The previous presiding judge, Judge Royce Lamberth, termed the Department of Interior "the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government." He has since been removed from the case. The Department of Interior last month flat out refused to abide by another federal judge's order to turn over electronic records to Cobell defendants. Small wonder that Native Americans believe the accounting project is merely one more attempt by the federal government to shirk its fiduciary duties and limit its liability.