How do you know the appropriate sums weren’t paid out?
You don’t, do you?
How do you know, in your precise non-theoretical and non-anecdotal Harvard Business School terminology, that “something was rotten in Denmark”?
You don’t, actually, do you? Because adequate records don’t exist to prove anything one way or another, except that somebody was damn bad at record-keeping, whether intentionally or not.
All I told you is what I know. What you know is precisely nothing, not anecdotally, not financially, not historically.
If you think a tarted-up statement like, “The legal dilemma was how to ascertain an appropriate settlement when the government’s record-keeping proved incapable of doing that on its own” differs materially from “it is just that the money has been spent and somehow there have been no decent records kept,” then, yes, I guess I am wrong and you are right.
You are so blindly right you should work for the government. If you already don’t.
“Because adequate records don’t exist to prove anything one way or another, except that somebody was damn bad at record-keeping, whether intentionally or not”
While adequate records do not exist IN THE GOVERNMNENT to make the case that they might have made more payments than everyone believes; they just can’t prove it ‘cause the records are so bad, adequate records do exist, outside the government, within the records of the gas/oil/mining companies and the banks that at least among gas/oil/mining leases the gas/oil/mining companies’ records identified as on tribal lands, the sums the gas/oil/mining interests paid in royalties for those leases alone don’t appear to be represented by the sums paid to the tribes, in the banking records.
It is your speculation, and maybe the government’s claim, that ‘we DID pay more money than claimed, and the tribes know it and contrived to hide that fact on their end’ is pure speculation ‘cause thanks to the government it cared so little about accounting for this matter that it can prove NOTHING about it. Naturally, the government has lost all its cases on this issue in the courts; as seems only fair.