In the absence of action by the U.S. Interior Department, a state Senate committee has assumed oversight of the highly criticized Department of Hawaii Home Lands, a challenging task that should not be taken lightly.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie has assigned a task force to assist DHHL, but legislators must keep pressure and scrutiny on the department to uphold its promises to fix problems cited for years in state audits.

The department’s poor practices in its obligation to provide leases to Native Hawaiians was revealed in a three-part series this month by the Star-Advertiser’s Rob Perez. Although the federal government gave Hawaii the responsibility to administer the program more than 90 years ago, it never provided the regulations to govern. What has emerged is an extremely lax agency with more excuses on why it’s not fulfilling its mission than successes on behalf of Native Hawaiians.

Abercrombie has notified the Hawaiian Homes Commission that his task force includes the attorney general, state finance director and Department of Land and Natural Resources chairman. But it excludes any beneficiaries, those who are at least 50 percent Native Hawaiian, an unacceptable rejection. The DHHL commissioners went into a closed session for more than two hours in a meeting last week to discuss the governor’s task force.

The department has been criticized in five reports by the state auditor over the past two decades, the most recent one last month concerning the DHHL’s Homestead Services Division. The audit pointed out lax oversight, mismanagement, lousy record-keeping, poor communication and a lack of policies and procedures at a level that undermines the obligation to serve Native Hawaiians.

In a briefing last Thursday before the state Senate Committee on Tourism and Hawaiian Affairs, Jobie Masagatani, DHHL director and chairwoman of the commission that oversees DHHL, cited changes "underway," which, she said, "we certainly want to show progress" on in six months but "may not be complete."

Those, Masagatani said, consist of analyzing "the most severely delinquent accounts" of at least 180 days, "mapping out of internal processes," re-establishing a system to track delinquent loans, continuing the commission’s briefing of various loan programs, filling "critical vacancies" and identifying "appropriate benchmarks to evaluate progress."

The public spotlight needs to remain on DHHL to ensure that these "benchmarks" are met and actually benefit beneficiaries.

Masagatani was named to head the commission by Abercrombie a year ago and was confirmed by the Senate this month. A deputy director of the department from 1995 to 2002, she said of the senators after last week’s hearing: "I think they’re very interested in seeing the program move forward successfully."

That’s quite the understatement. After decades of dysfunction, it behooves the state and DHHL to start shoring up long-standing deficiencies and enact clear, fair operational rules.

"All of the issues that were brought to the table tonight were raised in the ’70s," Hawaiian Homes Commission member Renwick Tassill said at the hearing. "The lack of procedures, the lack of policy, is what we tried to discuss 40 years ago … and that’s the thing that’s holding us up today — policies."

The Senate committee should actively engage in this issue, beyond waiting for a progress report at another hearing in six months, or for yet another audit. Senate President Donna Mercado Kim pointedly reminded Masagatani that audits, similar hearings and plans for change had been part of the past, to no avail.

In a private meeting at the White House early this month, Robin Danner, president of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, said she asked President Barack Obama to authorize the Interior Department to start a process of governing over the roughly 200,000-acre trust to provide homestead lots to eligible Native Hawaiians. If nothing else, federal pressure could be helpful to push improvements along.

In practicality, however, oversight of DHHL must come, at least, from the state Senate committee. It should include on-site observations by committee staffers of DHHL’s activities toward addressing the problems that have persisted for far too long.