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WASHINGTON, D.C. June 9 - A Yale University law professor has told a federal judge that Congress is the reason why thousands of American Indians cannot get a proper accounting of their government-run trust accounts.

John H. Langbein, the government's first witness in the latest trial over the accounts, made the statement as he defended his novel legal theory that the government does not have the same responsibilities to the Indians that other trustees face. The professor said that Congress had effectively modified those trust obligations by acts passed since the trust was established in 1887.

Langbein's comments surprised lawyers representing a group of American Indians seeking to force the government to give the beneficiaries of Individual Indian Trust Accounts a full accounting of their money. "The government has spent more than $750 million trying to reform these accounts and the government's witness is effectively telling us that wasn't enough," said Keith Harper, a lawyer for the Native American Rights Fund.

"This is an amazing statement, given how much effort the government has made during the seven years of this lawsuit to say that it was doing everything possible to resolve the many problems with the trust accounts," Harper added.

The Yale professor acknowledged during two days of testimony before U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth that the private sector would have closed down a trust operation as badly run as the Interior Department's Indian trust. "Not only would the OCC (the bank regulating Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) shut down the trust, so would the shareholders," Langbein said. Under cross examination last week, the professor said those problems should be laid on Congress, not the Interior Department.

"My sense is that I have had that view way, way back that there is a terrible problem here, which is that Interior is delivering the bad news, but Congress is, in my view, the source of the problem," he told Lamberth.

As Langbein saw it, the problem was that Congress had not adequately funded the operations of the trust, which he described as "this very troubled situation."

The professor said he was unable to say how much money should have been spent on the Indian trust operations, but he did say that he had gotten the clear impression from talks with government lawyers about the trust case that it had "been hampered across time by shortages of resources."

Langbein also testified that when Congress failed to appropriate funds for the trust they were effectively modifying the trust.

Lawyers for the Indian plaintiffs challenged that view. They quoted from a 2001 decision by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in the Indian trust case which held "that Congress intended to impose in trustees traditional fiduciary duties unless Congress has unequivocally expressed an intent to the contrary."

"There is no statement any where that says the government's responsibility to American Indians is anything other that the traditional trust responsibility," said Harper.

Separately, a senior Interior Department official acknowledged last week that not all Indian Trust accounts will be given a "full accounting" under the reform plan that the government has submitted to a federal judge here.

James Cason, an associate deputy secretary of Interior, made the statements as he testified in support of the department's plan for dealing with the many problems that have resulted from the department's admittedly poor administration of the trust.

Under questioning by lawyers seeking a "full accounting" of all trust accounts, Cason said that the government's plan called for making an accounting of the approximately 300,000 accounts that existed as of Oct. 25, 1994. Any accounts closed before that date won't be checked, he said. And Cason, who has been the point man for trust reform at the department, said the accounting will go back only to June 24, 1938.

Interior officials picked the 1994 date because that's when a Congress, unhappy with the Interior Department's management of the accounts, enacted a law calling for an accounting of all trust funds. The 1938 date was picked for the end of the accounting because that's when another law concerning the management of the accounts was enacted.

For more information contact Bill McAllister, phone: 703 385-6996, and visit the Indian Trust web site.