For almost 200 years, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has embodied the government-to-government relationships between the U.S. and the federally recognized tribes. One of BIA’s key priorities is administering and managing lands held in trust by the U.S. government on behalf of American Indians, Indian tribes and Alaska Natives. 

Protecting assets under trust 

The lands that the U.S. government holds in trust for Indigenous Americans are valuable, and the owners of those lands must be fairly compensated for their use. For more than 20 years, CGI has partnered with BIA to implement and continuously modernize the mission-critical platform that manages the processes for administering lands held in trust: the Trust Asset and Accounting Management System (TAAMS).

With TAAMS, BIA and Tribal users access trust asset data and trust asset management tools to maintain records relating to land ownership, contracts and leases, and other data. The workflows and capabilities provided by TAAMS enable BIA to understand complex land ownership rights, manage the processes associated with land lease and usage, and facilitate payments to American Indian families and tribes.

TAAMS supports the core business processes associated with BIA’s mission of promoting economic opportunity while carrying out the responsibilities associated with protecting and improving the trust assets of Native Americans.

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55 million
Surface acres managed
57 million
Sub-surface mineral estate acres managed

Empowering decision-making

BIA and CGI continue to evolve how users access data within TAAMS, delivering new insights to support decision-making. As BIA continues to optimize its business processes and integrate additional modules into TAAMS, CGI expands access to analytics tools, to improve access to and analysis of key data.  

Person sitting at a desk working on a laptop
Smiling children and adult using a tablet in a field of grass

Increasing transparency

With the Fee To Trust public portal, BIA will enable individual landowners to submit applications that launch the process to transfer a title of land to the federal government to be held in trust. The in-development portal will provide an easy-to-use interface, validating application data completeness at the point of submission, which replaces time-consuming, manual processes.