UNDP Does Not Monitor Afghan Police Payments, 20 Hours, No Comment

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive, 2d in series

@InnercityPress.com

UNITED NATIONS, June 23 -- Even when give at least 20 hours to comment on its own internal audits of its scandal plagued Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, the UN Development Program chooses to attack the Press rather than explain its waste, fraud and abuse.

  Additional internal audit documents obtained and exclusively published today by Inner City Press show the wider nature and longer term knowledge of the problems.

  As noted in the first installment of this series LOTFA purports to be about training and "building capacity" of Afghan police. But it is essentially a money transfer and payroll service, with a sideline as a travel agency.

  But even its payroll service is mismanaged. Sample "Observation # 1" says auditors

"observed that no or a limited review and monitoring is being carried out by UNDP LOTFA Project over this process from inception to final payment to the police force."

Under the heading "impact or risk," the auditors state the obvious:

"Non-monitoring of Government disbursement may have the following impacts/risks... Funds may be utilized for purposes/activities other than the project objectives."

Ya don't say. And what could those other activities be?

  As exclusively reported yesterday, Sample "Observation # 8" which is the first of the LOTFA documents Inner City Press is exclusively putting online says auditors "were not provided copies of bank transfer letters" for "MoI Chartered Flight Kabul - Turkey," costing $459,100.

   As well as re-submitting the first round of questions late on June 22, Inner City Press requested comment on this and two other audits, and asked UNDP to state:

1) WHY Manoj Basnyat is no longer the country director -- did this have ANYTHING to do with the LOTFA irregularities?

2) the date on which each of Basnyet, Sandeep Kumar and Ubadallah Sahibzada became aware of the irregularities and of the attached audits. Thanks, on deadline.

Twenty hours later, rather than answer a single question or comment on any of the audits, UNDP's Abdel-Rahman Ghandour responded that the first round of questions had ended up in UNDP's spam folder. But obviously the questions above hadn't. And still there have been no answers.

Since this is a series, UNDP is invited to provide comment for the next installment. There are many audits, many questions and many problems. So far Inner City Press has published two audits, and UNDP has no commented on or explained either. 

What are UNDP's responses to audit observations 3 and 7 on double payment of salaries? Watch this site.http://www.innercitypress.com/undp2lotfa062312.html