Hot tip for any reporters interested in newly disclosed documents on waste, fraud and abuse at the United Nations:
Just days after I queried the U.S. Mission to the UN about its commitment to UN transparency (Paging Ambassador Susan Rice), the Mission finally posted on its web site more than 130 previously secret UN internal audit reports. The UN, for all its endless promises about transparency and its ample enjoyment of other people’s money, does not release these reports to the public. It is only thanks to the U.S. that they are now seeing daylight at all — though it takes some trolling through the Mission’s web site to find them.
For anyone who cares about even minimal integrity in UN management and handling of taxpayer money, there’s a trove of bombshell material here. Together, the reports total hundreds of pages, but the typical report runs about 10-20 pages. They date from October, 2008 through August, 2009.
Here’s a link to the U.S. Mission’s web page on UN Oversight and Transparency with the main links, and here are direct links to the newly posted and until-now confidential internal audit reports from 2008 and 2009.
Pick your subject and dive in, whether it’s a summary of the “higher risks” due to “the lack of an appropriate structure” for the UN’s own Ethics Office, or a report on the dire derelictions of reporting and accountability dogging the plump trust funds of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Specifically set up to better coordinate aid, OCHA features in a Nov. 2008 audit report as handling trust funds with a throughput of hundreds of millions of dollars, but not bothering to produce any consolidated statement of cash flow. OCHA also had “little discernible linkage” between strategic planning and “the measurement and reporting of actual performance.”
For those interested in the UN’s climate bureaucracy, check out the July, 2009 report on the slop of the UNFCCC Secretariat’s conference management, with its multi-year delays in accounting for funds. Or delve into the Dec., 2008 report on the UNFCCC’s Clean Development Mechanism, where the governance was found “not adequate to mitigate reputational and other risks,” and the executive board “due to lack of time” had neglected to adopt any code of conduct whatsoever to address such corrosive problems as conflicts of interest.
Or, in the realms of UN peacekeeping, with its more than $8 billion annual budget, for which U.S. taxpayers alone fork out roughly $2 billion per year, check out the UN’s nearly $1 billion annual program for peacekeeping air operations. In an August, 2009 report, the UN’s own internal auditors noted that participation by senior management was “inadequate,” current staffing levels were “insufficient,” time of effective bidding on air charter services was “insufficient,” provisions in air charter agreements were “unclear” and some vendor registration was “improper.”
It takes a certain amount of determination to slog through the UN jargon, in which an executive summary of “not adequate” is often code for outright abuse or screaming failure, if you slog on to the details of the report. But in these reports, which cover only a sampling of the UN’s sprawling global system, the problems roll on and on. In corners that rarely receive attention from the media, they range from poorly documented lump-sum handling of noncompetitively-sourced travel arrangements for the UN mission in East Timor (UNMIT), to the UN’s disregard of its own rules in choosing a director for the UN Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD), headquartered in Japan.
Thank you, Ms. Rosett.
Although this will surprise few, I’m sure it will outrage many.
Nice of them to put these in facsimile form, such that the pdfs are not search-able (I can’t merely look for “$” to cut through the nonsense. It seems every person is a potential looter, every level of government (school-board, city, county, state, federal) is a looter, the various nations are looters and the super-nation (the UN) is a looter. I’m taking some solace in the fact that there’s no invading aliens from the other side of the galaxy lining up to loot me; they’d be too smart to accept our trash-cash.
As for reading and processing the information, if it really is all in non-searchable form, perhaps a crowd-sourcing effort, to simply have people do straight copies by typing up the documents, would be a great idea to help the effort to take action against the UN wastefulness.
Like the one carried out by Donna Laframboise http://www.noconsensus.org/ipcc-audit/press-release.php to sift through the 2007 IPPC climate report.
I must admit, I ‘Holdered’ through the material you’ve painstakingly collected here. Can’t we just bail out of the UN and demand that it be relocated to Zimbabwe or something.
The invaluable Ms. Rosett shows that she is one of the few remaining reliable practitioners of the craft of journalism. She follows up on a story.
I do admire your dedication and persistence in raising the lid on that cesspool known as the U.N. Has anyone at anytime been able to implement even the most modest of budgetary reforms? (of course not) Just about everyone knows that the U.N. as an operational entity is one big slush fund that allows relatives of third-world despots to hang out in NYC under the most lavish conditions. Their “peace-keeping” operations have not brought anyone any peace wherever they’ve set up shop and I too would love to see that whole wasteful edifice dumped in Zimbabwe.
What have you got against Zimbabwe? If you want the u.n. off our shores, ship ‘em to someplace they can really enjoy and feel right at home, like North Korea.
Dear Ms. Rosett,
I am currently working with a UN mission overseas, and I do agree that there are problems with administration. We do have a number of audits each year, and there are some serious efforts at reform. I would say things have been steadily improving at OCHA, which is a small office, and a good use of money since OCHA has focused on a narrow array of issues in a constructive way. I do think that OCHA has helped more people than the US in Colombia, which has spent a several billion over the past few years and the GAO has little good to say about the alternative development programs there. In Afghanistan, take one look at the billions being spent on Gen. McChrystal’s ppt chart (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/29/mcchrystal-afghanistan-powerpoint-slide), any idea how many of your tax dollars are going down the tubes there without an audit??
The UN is all things anti-American. Fraud, waste, outright theft and inefficiency are the order of the day. I suppose UNICEF might be one good program; that is, if you think using innocent children to collect money, some of which ends up in the hands of crooks, despots & fat cat bureaucrats, is acceptable.
In my view, the UN needs to go away, and yesterday would be too soon. Ending up in Zimbabwe would be too good for this band of miscreants.
Don’t forget the rape, pedophilia, slavery, and forced prostitution.
http://www.infowars.net/articles/january2007/030107UN_Sex.htm
Except that people from the UN DO work in Zimbabwe, not everyone works in NY and Geneva. And there is a lot of good humanitarian work that the UN does in Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Central African Republic, Haiti, DRC and many other places that are tough to say the least to work at. While I accept that the UN has kleptocrats, as some say, the UN doesn’t actually have as much money as many people thing. The IMF and World Bank are far more loaded.
I am thinking that reports like these, especially in capitals like Ottawa, London, Paris and Rome, simply do not want to be seen by the insecure power-hungry.
Therefore reports like this will be put on a shelf, and let to gather dust.
Otherwise, we will see a movement away from this organization whose original goal was to raise those countries which endured the darkness perpetrated by Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, up to the level of those who triumphed over those three. The result was vastly different. Namely those who endured the darkness, and those who were colonies, want the victorious countries dragged down to their level.
An Assembly of Democracies is the best option, plus the matter of currencies pegged to the strongest currency in the British Commonwealth, which would be, in my observation, a currency union between Canada and Australia.
Considering that the UN is made up of kleptocrats, run by kleptocrats, and serves to benefit kleptocrats, why is anyone surprised to find that they are rather lax with other people’s money.
You’d really have to be a total tool not to know that the U.N. is THE most dangerous organization of popular access in the world.
Not one single time in its history has the U.N. been successful at achieving its stated goals. Not once. But corruption is the one thing they do excel at. That and screwing the U.S. citizens.
With the international clamoring for ‘global government’ and for global taxation where the revenues would be used to fund the U.N.s agenda, it makes you wonder what kind of malfeasance and incompetence lurks in the muck behind each of the individual governments who promote U.N. control over global resources.
All scanning software comes with character recognition ability. In other words, it’s not that hard to convert these PDFs into searchable documents. It won’t be 100% accurate though, you’ll need to keep the originals for reference.
TO JR: don´t know how much they pay you for writing these lies, because you (if you really work for a PKO) and I know very well what is going.