BOISE, Idaho - Nearly a dozen Indian tribes, including the Nez Perce of Idaho, have filed suit against the federal government, asking it to account for billions of dollars held in tribal trusts.

The lawsuit is the latest legal challenge to the government's handling of American Indian trust money, which tribal representatives contend has been shoddy and inadequate.

The Native American Rights Fund, a Boulder, Colo.-based nonprofit law firm, is seeking to represent about 240 tribal governments that have trust accounts with the United States. The firm says the U.S. Department of the Interior, which manages the accounts, has failed to provide a complete accounting despite several congressional orders.

The government holds about 1,600 trust fund accounts for more than 300 tribes. Their total worth is estimated at about $3 billion.

Tribes have been worried about the state of their trust funds since the early 1980s, when several government agencies issued reports showing the accounts were in disarray, said John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund.

"The reports detailed records lost or never kept, systems that didn't work or weren't coordinated, and policies that were deficient or never even existed," Echohawk said.

The funds - some of which date back to the 1800s - contain money awarded to tribes from judgments against the United States for unlawful appropriation of American Indian lands. They also hold revenue from oil, gas, timber and other natural resources on tribal lands that have been tapped by the U.S. government.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 28 - days before a Dec. 31, Congress-imposed deadline would have closed the statute of limitations on lawsuits challenging the government's trust fund accounting.

The Native American Rights Fund filed the lawsuit in hopes of ensuring that tribal governments that either didn't have the resources for a legal fight or weren't aware their right to sue was about the expire, didn't permanently lose the chance to ask for a complete accounting, said NARF attorney Don Wharton.

The lawsuit asks the court to rule that a government effort in the early 1990s to satisfy Congress' orders was unacceptable, Wharton said. The tribes are also asking the court to order the Interior Department to perform a complete accounting.

Department of Interior spokesman Shane Wolf said it would be inappropriate to comment on pending litigation.

The law firm estimates that about 70 tribes have already sued the U.S. government on an individual basis.

The latest lawsuit joins another claim alleging mismanagement of Indian trust funds. In that case, Blackfeet Indian Elouise Cobell, of Blackfoot, Mont., sued the government in 1996 over what she said was its mismanagement of hundreds of thousands of accounts held on behalf of individual Indians, containing more than $100 billion.

That suit is on hold while the Indians fight an appellate court decision to remove a federal judge from their case. The government has said it is too expensive to piece together from its records how much the Indian accounts are actually worth, and has proposed an $8 billion settlement.

The other named plaintiffs in the latest case are: the Yakama Nation in Washington; the Klamath Tribe in Oregon; the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico; the Tule River and Yurok tribes in California; the Hualapai Tribe in Arizona; the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribe, the Pawnee Nation, and the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma; and Santee Sioux Tribe in Nebraska.