After leaked memo on Angela Kane's involvement into potential scandal: - Ban Ki-moon requests that investigation go forward

Yesterday, after InnercityPress leaked an internal memo from OIOS, the office of Secretary-General (Ban Ki-moon) called for the investigation to go on!

Click here for the document @ InnercityPress: http://www.innercitypress.com/comvoios1icp.pdf

Click here for the document @ InnercityPress: http://www.innercitypress.com/comvoios1icp.pdf

Ban Ki-moon Musical Chairs: Old Managers - New Positions - same duty station NEW YORK !!!

At UN As Ban Ki-moon Taps Eliasson, G77 Complaints, Maged Auditions, Africa Excluded, Khare to DFS?

By Matthew Russell Lee

Click here to view this story on InnerCityPress.Com

UNITED NATIONS, March 2 -- When UN Secretary GeneralBan Ki-moon dropped Asha-Rose Migiro as his deputy in January and Inner City Press reported it, Ban's office refused to confirm it, leaving that to the UN in Migiro's native Tanzania.

After Ban on March 2 named as Migiro's replacement Jan Eliasson of Sweden, Inner City Press was pitched by Nordic diplomats to "please write something positive about Eliasson." Okay -- in his time as President of the General Assembly, he mediated a few conflicts such as on disability rights, and was more active than some of his successors.

But later on March 2, a number of developing work diplomats approached Inner City Press with outrage at the appointment. Not only on what Inner City Press immediately reported -- that Ban was dropping an African for a Nordic, after having defied the African Group and General Assembly by refusing to name a full time Special Adviser on Africa -- but about what Eliasson did while PGA.

They say Eliasson was central to an attempt to move UN reform out of the Fifth (Budget) committee, where developing countries have relatively more strength, to the plenary where better staffed developed world Permanent Representatives have the edge.

"Eliasson can call meetings, sure," a developing world diplomat told Inner City Press, "but who will be invited?"

With Argentina's Susana Malcorra -- more on her anon -- moving to Chief of Staff to replace Vijay Nambiar of India, and "Ban's brain" Kim Won-soo being parked in the Change Management position previously held by India's Atul Khare, Inner City Press now predicts based on sourcing that Khare will be moved to Malcorra's spot atop the Department of Field Support. Only at Ban's UN: musical chairs.

Meanwhile to belatedly fill the Special Adviser on Africa post Ban is considering, or auditioning, Mubarak era Egyptian Permanent Representative Maged Abdelaziz, who delivered a defense of Ban in the General Assembly Friday afternoon. Things go lower every day in Ban's UN, where Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky won't even allow questions on these topics. Watch this site.

Management and Reform, on the Proposed UN Program Budget for 2012-13, before the Fifth (Administrative and Budgetary) Committee of the UNGA

CLICK HERE FOR THIS STATEMENT ON USUN WEBPAGE

Ambassador Joseph M Torsella
U.S. Representative for UN Management and Reform
U.S. Mission to the United Nations

New York, NY

October 27, 2011

AS DELIVERED

Thank you Mr. Chairman, and thank you also, on behalf of the United States, to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Under-Secretary-General Angela Kane, ACABQ Chairman Collen Kelapile, and all the members of the Secretariat and the staff who have produced the 2012-13 budget for our consideration today.

Before I begin my substantive remarks, I do want to welcome the comments made regarding transparency by the Group of 77 and China and their joining us in our efforts to raise the public profile of the Fifth Committee and operate in a fully transparent and open manner by taking the important step of webcasting our public sessions, making us more effective advocates for the taxpayers to whom we are all ultimately accountable. We enthusiastically join their call for webcasting all formal sessions of the Committee and applaud their leadership on this issue.

Mr. Chairman, we meet at a time of fiscal crisis, not for just one or a few Member States but for nearly the entire membership of the United Nations. In the General Debate that recently ended, we heard leader after leader, north and south, east and west, speak of the new economic realities. For all of us, resources have become more scarce, outcomes have grown more important, and leaders are being held more accountable.

But the wisest of those leaders know that times of great crisis are also times of great opportunity. The fiscal challenges of our time give the United Nations a chance to fully realize the calls, made over many years now, for fundamental and far-reaching reforms in how the United Nations does business, calls that in more prosperous times were easier to ignore. They give us, as Member States, the chance to rise above some of the tired dynamics that have played out in this room year after year, to come together around an agenda for a leaner and more effective United Nations and prove the cynics wrong. And they give each of us here the chance to leave behind a lasting legacy to those who follow us: a strengthened, renewed, more dynamic and entrepreneurial United Nations.

In this budget document, we can see that some in the United Nations system have indeed recognized the true opportunity in this crisis.

We see leadership: the Secretary-General took a bold first step—and some political heat—in calling for United Nations managers to tighten their belts. We applaud him for seeking to halt a ten-year trend of budget increases, and for courageously telling this organization not what it wants to hear but what it needs to hear: these are not ordinary times.

We see innovation: the Department of Public Information proposes to spend about $5 million dollars less than it did in 2010-2011 by introducing modern information management technologies, making wider use of the Internet and social media, and deploying online reporting and management tools.

And we see what good, entrepreneurial management can look like at the United Nations. We heard in the Committee on Conferences that, since 2009, the Department of General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM) has reduced the number of pages printed by the United Nations by 65 percent. That means that DGACM has saved, on an annual basis, a pile of paper 49 times the height of the Secretariat building. We need to look no further than that pile of paper to know that reducing resources does not mean compromising mandates: the United Nations, like any organization, can always do more with less. And doing so unleashes a cycle of creativity and dynamism, innovation and renewal.

But as we review this budget we also see, as I said here last month, that while the Secretary-General has led, not enough of the rest of us—both within the Organization and among the Member States—have followed. The innovations I just described have enabled the publishing section of DGACM to propose a reduction in its work force by 41 posts, for example; yet, the Organization as a whole is shrinking by just 44 net posts, a reduction of only four-tenths of one percent. And while we here debate that 0.4 percent, potential add-ons to this budget—both those that we know today, and those yet to be considered—mean that the Secretary-General’s commendable call for budget restraint could, if we are not disciplined and careful in our work here in this Committee, end in a budget that actually increases from the last biennial budget.

So how then should we respond fully to the Secretary-General’s leadership? How do we seize this opportunity?

Our first and most urgent task is to set the United Nations on the path of real fiscal discipline in the 2012-13 budget. That means passing a budget with substantial and sustainable reductions. It means judging whether we’ve achieved real savings by using as our benchmark not a budget outline, but the expenses we approved during the previous period, the 2010-11 bienium. It means measuring all expenditures, including add-ons, in our definition of expenses for the 2012-13 period. And it means achieving savings that will recur, savings the ACABQ would call “significant and structural”.

Doing that will require, above all, tackling personnel costs, which have dramatically increased over the past decade. As the ACABQ report points out, 74 cents out of every dollar the United Nations spends is related to personnel costs.

The United States therefore calls for a freeze on pay for United Nations staff while the comparator salaries, those of the United States federal civil service, are frozen. We also repeat our call for repealing the nearly 3 percent raise given to New York based employees through the cost of living adjustment in August, and we urge the General Assembly to act on this matter. Many Member States, governments, businesses and NGOs have implemented total or partial hiring freezes on vacancies resulting from attrition, and in these difficult times the United Nations should do the same. Moreover, posts that have been persistently vacant over long periods should be abolished. The disturbing trend toward upward re-classification of posts identified by ACABQ should be reversed: the budget before us proposes upward reclassification of 55 posts—more than double the 27 reclassifications contained in the proposed program budgets for the past three biennia combined. Few of these reclassifications should be approved. Furthermore, we call on the Secretariat to comprehensively review all current employee benefit programs and costs, including health care, pension, leave, and travel policies.

Mr. Chairman, The United States has profound respect for the work of the dedicated professionals serving the United Nations—many of them, especially those in the field, doing so in very difficult circumstances and often at great personal sacrifice. But we do those men and women no favors by turning a blind eye to the trends in personnel costs as a whole. In fact, it is the employees of the United Nations who will ultimately suffer if we and United Nations managers do not do our jobs well, and more draconian austerity measures become unavoidable. And when a significant percentage of employees leave each year through normal attrition—retirements, resignations, transfers, non-renewals, and so forth—smart managers can right-size the United Nations and avoid across-the-board layoffs at the same time.

Our second task is to ensure that the budget we pass is in fact a binding budget, and prevents the United Nations from spending more than we actually approve this fall. We continue to be disappointed and concerned that every year Member States are presented a significant number of add-ons at considerable cost that in some cases are not mandated, in many cases can be foreseen, and in all cases should be better managed. Budgets are not suggestions. The United Nations must strictly adhere to the principles reflected in resolutions 41/213 and 42/211 that call for new proposals to be "budget neutral" or offset with savings within the approved budget. And we, as Member States, must ensure that the Secretary-General has the tools to enforce these policies.

We also continue to be concerned that the large additions to budget requests stemming from “re-costing.” While we recognize the organization needs some ability to protect itself from inflation and currency fluctuations, there are better ways to achieve that protection than passing a budget with blanks instead of numbers and regularly adding new funds to it. We continue to seek further details and analysis from the Secretariat—as soon as possible—on options, such as currency hedging, to deal with this issue. We should leave here with the confidence that we’ve approved a final budget, not a first draft.

Our third and final task is to make this the last year we deal with a budget under the current rules, by reforming the budget process itself.

As the United States has said before, the United Nations’s budget is too complex and opaque, and it is built around the wrong measures. Paradoxically, there is too much data, and too little useful information. Readers of United Nations budget documents, for example, will search in vain for the actual travel budget by department or the cost of employee healthcare. But they can easily find the precise number of policy papers issued by any number of the executive committees, as if the number of papers itself is a meaningful measure of accomplishment.

The budget in its current form of 37 different and partitioned sections would tie the hands of the best manager in the world. Our job is to set priorities, not to needlessly constrain the Secretary-General’s ability to operationally adapt, as changing circumstances and changing times demand, to meet the goals we set. If we are demanding more accountability for results from United Nations managers—as we should—we should also give them more flexibility to redeploy some resources within and among budget sections.

As the ACABQ and the Board of Auditors have noted, the United Nations’s results-based budgeting process needs a major overhaul to make it into a useful tool for management. Its focus should shift from process and outputs to results and outcomes.

And finally, we need to reexamine how managers build the United Nations budget in the first place. It is striking that each budget begins with the prior budget’s appropriation. We are caught in a perpetual exercise of adding to the previous biennium’s budget appropriation with the assumption that all previous mandates should be met in the same way and at the same funding level and every new mandate requires new resources. This premise is flawed. The fundamental reality is that resources do not equal results. No organization can work effectively without prioritizing to bridge the gap between limited resources on the one hand and ambitious goals on the other. That’s a conversation held daily in most governments, businesses and families; it should be held more frequently here at the United Nations and in the Fifth Committee.

Three tasks. A 2012-13 budget that represents a significant and sustainable belt-tightening from 2010-2011. A 2012-13 budget that is in fact final, comprehensive, and stable for the full biennium. And reform of the budget process this year so that United Nations budgets in future years will be prepared, presented and debated very differently. If we do those three things, Mr. Chairman, we will indeed have seized this opportunity.

What’s more, we will have kept faith with the people who sent us here, and with the people whose future depends on our work. We are entrusted with the responsibility of allocating these resources, but they do not belong to us. Every dollar, yen, euro, yuan, every peso, real, and rand sent here represents the hard work of a taxpayer somewhere. And every dollar wasted in the United Nations system is in fact a wasted opportunity to build a safer, freer, and more prosperous world.

The United States is therefore committed to achieving a reformed and renewed United Nations that protects human rights, keeps the peace and provides security, seeds development, finds common solutions to the urgent problems of the new century and lives within its means. We look forward to working constructively with all delegations in the weeks ahead to take fullest advantage of this unique opportunity to set the United Nations on a path of economy and excellence for the years ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senior UN officials respond to the former Under-Secretary-General Inga-Britt Ahlenius's end of service report that was recently leaked to the press

CLICK HERE FOR THIS ON UNTV

Ahlenius end-of-service report on OIOS and Ban Ki-moon secrecy is here (click here)

STORY: UN / AHLENIUS

TRT: 1.32

SOURCE: UNTV

RESTRICTIONS: NONE

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS

DATELINE: 22 JULY 2010, NEW YORK CITY

SHOTLIST:

RECENT 2010, NEW YORK CITY

1. Wide shot, exterior United Nations headquarters

22 JULY 2010, NEW YORK CITY

2. Wide shot, video press conference

3. Cutaway, reporters

4. SOUNDBITE (English) Angela Kane, Undersecretary-General for management, United Nations:

“When it comes to the peace and security issues I think the Secretary-General has been very much at the forefront of all kinds of important issues of the day; he is at the same time the chief administrative office as he is leading the charge on all of the political issues. We just heard that he’s met with the leader of the United Kingdom this morning; I also want to mention that it’s the Millennium Development Goals, it’s not only the political issues, but also the social and economic issues. I just want to mention climate change. So I think that Mrs. Ahlenius statement I found rather surprising I must say from my vantage point that she make such a statement which I do not believe is reflective of the facts.”

5. Cutaway, reporters

6. SOUNDBITE (English) Angela Kane, Undersecretary-General for management, United Nations:

“This is an end of assignment report. It is a personal opinion of one person from within the Secretary-Generals senior team and I think that this is something that is going to be taken very seriously, and it is also a moment to sort of say ‘lets have a look at this, what does it really mean’. As I mentioned before we have also found that there are a number of inaccuracies in the report, a number of omissions in the report and I think that when one looks at the whole picture it gives a very different impression.”

7. Cutaway, journalists

8. Wide shot, press conference

STORYLINE:

Angela Kane, the United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary-General for management briefed journalists today (22 July) at the UN on the recent end of assignment report from former Under-Secretary-General Inga-Britt Ahlenius in which she criticized UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Commenting on Ahlenius statements concerning Bans handling of peacekeeping issues, Kane said that when it came to peace and security issues the Secretary-General had been “very much at the forefront of all kinds of important issues of the day.”

She added, “I found rather surprising I must say from my vantage point that she make such a statement which I do not believe is reflective of the facts.”

Kane also explained that the document, which was leaked to the press, was Ahlenius’ end of assignment report. She noted that it was a personal opinion of one person from within the Secretary-General’s senior team and “I think that this is something that is going to be taken very seriously, and it is also a moment to sort of say ‘lets have a look at this, what does it really mean’.”

UN Job Reductions Target Lower Levels, Kane Memo Says Can Cut Permanent

By Matthew Russell Lee @InnercityPress.com

UNITED NATIONS, October 17, updated Oct 18 -- As the UN reacts to calls to cut its budget, its "post reductions" are disproportionately directed as lower level staff, who accuse Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his administration of a lack of transparency and even honesty.

Inner City Press has obtained a copy of a member from Ban's top Management official Angela Kane which tells Departments to start preparing for cuts, even before the UN General Assembly considers them, and provides for the termination of staff with "permanent" contracts. Click here to view.

But in an October 17 response to questions Inner City Press asked back on October 7 about 41 planned post eliminations in the UN's Publishing Section, the UN statesthat

"The post reductions in the New York Printing Section are contained in the Secretary General’s proposed programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013. They are expected to be achieved through attrition and other management measures, i.e. without involuntary redundancies."

Contrast this with Kane's internal memo, stating that

"I am writing regarding the abolition of posts proposed in your department/office for the biennium 2012-2013. As you know, the final decision on any abolition of post(s) rests with the General Assembly. In the event that the General Assembly does approve the Secretary-General's proposals, certain preparatory work should be undertaken by each department/office with regard to the staff that will be affected by the abolition of their respective posts... staff members who hold permanent appointments must be given three (3) months written notice of termination of their appointment."

The UN's response-after-ten-day is also inconsistent with even the UN's pro-management write up of the underlying meeting, which states that

"The Secretary-General's final budget proposal assumes that 37 TC posts and 4 GS posts will be abolished in the PS... processing of publications currently processed on offset machines will be outsourced... The 2012-2013 model implies that 81 posts need to be abolished."

One of the addressees, Narendra Nandoe, is said to be "sabotaging" the Publishing unit by refusing to order supplies or allow small errors to be fixed. So it goes at this UN.

Kane, SG & DSG, requested (c) UN Photo but caption analysis not shown. For now

The UN's response-after-ten-day begins with the UN's officially garbled transcription of Press questions, followed by a differently prepared transcription of the UN spokesman, with all "uhs" removed. (Some within the chain of command say that UN staff have been ordered to make it so.) So here is a "clean up" of the transcript of the October 7 noon briefing:

Inner City Press: yesterday, people working in UN publishing were told that 41 of those cuts will come from their department — 37 posts and 4 trades and crafts. I wanted you to confirm if that’s true, and they wonder, and I also in turn wonder, whether this idea of totally phasing out publication and laying those people off is something that’s been checked with Member States in terms of them using things like the Journal, and the various things that are printed by the UN, including reports. Is it true that 30 per cent of the cuts are in one division and why is that the case?

Spokesperson: I’d have to check on the details of what is a budget submission and a budget submission that goes to the Member States and is approved by Member States. If I have anything else further, then obviously we can let you know, but I think that’s an important factor here.

Inner City Press: I don’t know whether they are called lay-offs or post eliminations, will these, before they’re implemented, require the approval of the Fifth Committee?

Spokesperson: I need to check. But if it’s a budget submission, then a budget submission needs the approval of Member States.

Inner City Press: they were told, I don’t think it was said in either in the Fifth or ACABQ, I think it was said by the UN Secretariat to publishing people.

Spokesperson: As I say, I need to check.

Then for ten days, the UN did not provide a response. But documents came in. Watch this site.

Footnote: meanwhile the rest of "Kane's reign" bears marks of decline, down to the smallest and most simple things. Monday delegates groused that they couldn't even print, with the computer printer on the North Lawn's second floor left again without paper.

When the hours of the UN cafeteria were cut, they put potato chip and soda machines in the lobby for the other hours. Now these machines have been moved inside the cafeteria: locked up in the off-hours the machines were supposed to serve.

Likewise the small bar purportedly filling in for the closed-down Delegates' Lounge is rarely open. "Ban Ki-moon and Angela Kane have sucked," a well placed commadic UN staff source said, "the life out of the UN."

Update of Oct 18: while UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said he wouldn't comment on a "leaked memo" -- even if it contradicted the public answer he alluded to -- one of the problems reported above was acted on the UN the next day: the potato chip machine

(c) MRLee
Post publication, UN on Oct 18 moved soda and chips back to lobby. Thanks

UN Blames Delay in SAP Contract and Accounting Standards on States, But Changed ERP Plan

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, October 21 -- Is the current UN well or badly managed? In January 2008, more than twenty months ago, the UN's Department of Management announced it has selected Germany-based SAP for a contract for its enterprise resource or ERP technology project, and that the contract would be finalized in three months.

On October 21, Inner City Press asked Department of Management chief Angela Kane to confirm that the contract has still not been finalized, that ERP is being schedule and over budget, and to explain why. Inner City Press also asked why the UN is failing to live up to a 2010 deadline to implement the International Public Sector Accounting Standards. Video here, from Minute 44:34.

Ms. Kane acknowledged that the contract has not been signed. She blamed the General Assembly, that is the member states, for making the schedule "far too ambitious" and then only allocating the money in March 2009. She said the ERP project is not really over budget, because there is no real budget, "we were way off base." Video here, from Minute 49:43.

But the UN's Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions in its report on ERP criticized Ms. Kane's Department of Management for changing its proposal at the last minute. ACABQ sources say it's "DM's fault it got delayed -- now Kane is blaming others for her department's last minute changes" and thereby putting off the IPSAS accounting standards.

Ms. Kane on Oct. 21, SAP contract not shown

From the ACABQ report:

67. The Advisory Committee was informed of the revised requirements just as it was finalizing the present report. The reductions reflect changes in the sequence of activity and acquisition strategies, as well as delays in the approval of the project.
The Secretary-General now considers that it would be in the best interest of the Organization to complete the selection of the ERP software before proceeding with activities related to the acquisition of integration services rather than conducting those activities in a partially overlapping manner as initially envisaged. In addition, he proposes to break down the acquisition of integration services for the design, build and/or roll-out phases of the project instead of developing system integration proposals to cover a comprehensive range of services for the entire project at the outset (A/62/510/Rev.1, para. 35). ..The Committee was also provided with an updated timeline for the project (see annex IX), which shows an overall six-month delay in completion of the implementation.

68. The Advisory Committee was further informed that, as a consequence of this approach, the following activities and expenditures envisaged previously during 2008-2009 would not be completed during the biennium:

• Software licences and customization ($11,475,000): as a result of the Organization’s stronger negotiation strategy with the software vendors, there would be limited payment for software licensing during the design phase of the project, and any required customizations would be initiated later in 2009.
• Software integration ($21,847,400): based on the above-stated approach to the
acquisition of software integration services, there would be a significant
reduction in the overall work-months required during the biennium 2008-2009, as those resources would be required during the subsequent build and roll-out phases.
• Project and change management ($5,387,700): the ERP project team would postpone the recruitment of its full staffing complement until July 2009 until the initiation of the design phase after the completion of high-level business re-engineering activities in the first quarter of 2009. The change management strategy continues to focus on an awareness campaign for the stakeholders of the ERP project, pending approval by the General Assembly.
• Training ($5,615,400): the commencement of training is dependent upon the acquisition of the ERP software solution, which is in the final phase of evaluation.
• Operational costs ($749,000): the above delays have a corresponding impact on the requirements related to general operating expenses.

69. The Advisory Committee considers that these revisions represent a
significant change in the strategy for the implementation of ERP as set out in paragraph 35 of the report.

So the Secretariat made last minute "significant changes" to the ERP plan, then blames the resulting delay in the allocation of funds for not having taken steps due a year and a half ago, and puts back implementation of IPSAS accounting standards for two -- some say four -- years.

Again the question: Is the current UN well or badly managed?

Footnote: For weeks Inner City Press has been asking in the UN's noon briefing that Department of Management chief Angela Kane come to take questions, on why Office of Internal Oversight Services recommendations have not been implemented, from disciplining a staff member who pleaded guilty to having child pornography to recouping $7 million overpaid in Timor Leste.

On Wednesday Ms. Kane did come to the briefing, but only about the budget. Inner City Press, when called on, was told to limit itself to one question. While the Controller was still answering a question about the UN and the dollar, Ms. Kane left the briefing. It's been three months since the last one: it seems clear these should be more frequent.