BTFA - Accounting Reconciliation Tool (ART)
Investment ID: 010-000000703
Overview
Program Title
BTFA - Accounting Reconciliation Tool (ART)
Description
The Accounting Reconciliation Tool (ART) enables Interior to comply with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia order for a historical accounting of IIM and Tribal Trust accounts and the Trust Funds Management Reform Act of 1994.
Office: Federal Trust Program
Investment Initiation: 2004
Type of Program
Major IT Investments
Multi-Agency Category
Not Applicable
Investment Detail
The Accounting Reconciliation Tool (ART) helped save the government billions of dollars in potential liabilities during the Cobell v. Salazar class-action lawsuit. The Data within the ART allowed accountants and statisticians to extract information and statically provide evidence that helped facilitate a settlement of $1.4 billion for the Cobell portion of the lawsuit. Early in the lawsuit, the Cobell plaintiffs suggested accounting errors and mismanagement of trust fund assets could reach as high as $176 billion. Additionally, the information in ART has been and continues to be used for Tribal settlements and lawsuits, where further savings of millions of dollars for the government has occurred and will undoubtedly follow with future litigations. Also, the ART enables Interior to provide requested information to any Tribe or Individual Indian without having to pull boxes of records to search from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Therefore, if the document exists on ART, it delivers a quicker response to the requestor, it provides document preservation because the records do not need to be handles, and the cost saving from pulling a box from the NARA facility and the time of the searchers saves tens of thousands of dollars each year.