An inspection of three Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agency offices found record keeping in two of those offices to be flawed. The Office of Inspector General (OIG) reviewed record-keeping practices at the Southern Ute, Fort Berthold, and the Uintah & Ouray Agencies. Although we found no difficulties at the Uintah & Ouray Agency, officials at the Southern Ute Agency said that the Agency's oil and gas lease files were not in good condition, which added time to BIA's surface review.
We found that the Fort Berthold Agency used three rooms to file official records. One room was an office staffed by the realty specialist, the second was an unstaffed records room, and the third was a vault where the Office of the Special Trustee's records were kept. The vault appeared neat and orderly. The two other rooms, however, were in disarray. Further, we observed several boxes of documents without identification labels, unlocked file cabinets with loose files, and unrestricted access to the rooms.
We made three recommendations to BIA to help improve record keeping at BIA agency offices.