Showing posts with label foxnews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foxnews. Show all posts
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees blasted for poor financial handling
Published March 14, 2012 | FoxNews.com
EXCLUSIVE: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, two years ago was sitting on a stockpile of $437 million in unspent cash, even as a U.N. auditing agency warned that its sloppy handling of funds imperiled future contributions from U.N. member nations.
The report, issued last year but only introduced for member-state review in the U.N. General Assembly, cites UNHCR for sloppy bookkeeping, poor financial oversight, managerial disarray, and a lack of tools to judge how well it was doing its job of helping tens of millions of the world's displaced people.
The U.N.'s independent Board of Auditors used remarkably straight-forward language to lambaste the refugee agency, whose largest donor, the United States, contributed $712 million to UNHCR in 2010, according to the State Department. The auditors noted that the relief agency, which is financed largely by voluntary contributions, spent about $1.9 billion in 2010; its budget two years earlier was about $1.1 billion.
The auditors pointed out that there were “strong indicators of significant shortcomings in financial management" at the agency, headed since 2005 by Antonio Guterres, a former Socialist prime minister of Portugal. "This is a major risk for UNHCR," the auditors warned, "given the increasing pressures on donors to justify why they provide public funds to international aid organizations."
Moreover, the inspectors did not seem optimistic that the situation would change soon, even though UNHCR's management now says that it is working hard on a wide variety of fronts to change the disturbing situation.
The Board of Auditors report, written last year but only recently published, amounted to the first major external assessment of UNHCR's behavior after its spending began to balloon dramatically in 2008 in line with a new strategy known as the Global Needs Assessment, a novel way to encourage donors to come up with more cash.
Rather than looking at its donor pledges and then determining its budget, UNHCR is now using the Global Needs Assessment to determine the amount that it feels it needs to spend, then building a budget to accommodate that perspective -- though, in the end, it still must manage with the amount it takes in.
The new approach has given more of a social welfare tilt to UNHCR relief efforts, even though it is still thought of primarily as a front-line relief group that doles out emergency food and shelter to populations displaced across national borders by war, famine and drought.
Click here to see the Auditors Report.
The Obama administration has apparently found the Global Needs approach convincing. U.S. contributions to the relief agency increased by about 40 percent between 2008 and 2010,before tailing off only slightly last year.
For this year and next, when UNHCR hopes to spend about $3.3 billion a year under its Global Needs, a State Department spokesperson told Fox News, U.S. support "will depend on current crises to which UNHCR responds."
For UNHCR's external auditors, however, the issue is not so much the agency's needs as its financial and management capabilities -- and these it found dolefully lacking. Among other things, the auditors' report notes:
--UNHCR could not balance its many checkbooks. No fewer than 99 of its bank and investment accounts, holding more than $375 million, 'lacked up-to-date reconciliations, a key financial control.' The auditors had warned about the same problem a year earlier, and not much was done about it. (The backlog had been cut to three active accounts before the auditors' report was published.)
--the agency wasn't even prepared for its own audit, reflecting "significant deficiencies in the systems in place to prepare its financial statements, and in the quality of the supervision and ownership of these processes, from the most senior executive level downward and across the entire organization."
--UNHCR "remains unable to gather and analyses basic management information on its operations," or "to get a full grip on the performance of its implementing partners or the delivery of major initiatives." Translation: it doesn't know what it is actually doing.
--UNHCR's own share of what it takes in from donors is high. Despite roughly 22 percent of its $1.9 billion in actual spending for 2010 that went to "administrative overhead and staff benefits," the report notes. At the time of the audit, UNHCR had 6,300 regular staff working in some 380 offices located in 125 countries.
-- despite those overheads, roughly one-third of UNHCR's spending ($667 million) went to "implementing partners," meaning non-government organizations and others who carried out relief operations. Who they all were, and how well they functioned, was not at all clear. The process of selecting those partners, the auditors noted, "lacks rigor and transparency, increasing the risk of fraud, corruption, inefficiency and poor partner performance."
--More than half of the implementing partners had worked for UNHCR for more than five years, and the auditors found "little evidence of any kind of competitive selection process," cost comparison or matching of capabilities with requirements. The Board of Auditors said it was "particularly concerned at the lack of transparency in partner selection processes and the increased risk of fraud and corruption to which this exposes UNHCR."
--however badly the partners -- or for that matter, UNHCR staffers -- performed in the field, however, the Board of Auditors did not think highly of the agency's ability to judge it. "Performance from its country network does not enable management to make effective judgments as to the cost-effectiveness of projects and activities or to hold local managers accountable for performance," the report says.
If anything, the Board of Auditors report underplays the seriousness of UNHCR's lack of field intelligence on its own operations, many of which stem from a multimillion-dollar fiasco involving installation of a new, systemwide software system, known as Focus. The software was supposed to integrate financial and human resources information, in order to propel UNHCR toward better "results-based management."
According to another internal U.N. inspection report, which Fox News reported on last May, there have been "years of delays" in installing Focus, and the lack of information has affected hundreds of millions of dollars in UNHCR spending.
Asked how the U.S. viewed the Board of Auditors report, a State Department spokesman declared that "we follow the institutional and operational issues closely." The spokesman also pointed to statements made by the U.S. at a meeting of UNHCR's executive committee last October, where a U.S. diplomat declared that "several of the findings of the Board concern us," without going into detail. At another "ex-com" session in Geneva, U.S. Ambassador David Robinson underlined that "the United States remains a committed partner with UNHCR and the beneficiaries it serves."
How does UNHCR itself intend to deal with the management swamp outlined in the Board of Auditors report?
Not to worry, according to the agency's management. In a report nearly as long as the auditors' investigation, UNHCR last September outlined a lengthy list of "measures taken and proposed" to improve things. Some of them, however, seemed vague, or less than wholesale.
On the alarming bank account reconciliation process, for example, the agency reported that it had already done a great deal, and that “bank accounts held at Headquarters are fully reconciled and are routinely reconciled on a monthly basis.” But this excludes accounts in the field, where the auditors are particularly critical of oversight lapses.
In addressing what the auditors call "deficiencies in country office financial management and reporting capacity," UNHCR says it will "review relevant audit and inspection reports, consult with Headquarters and Bureaux and continue to analyse data ... to focus on those country offices in need of greater strengthening of financial management practices. Based on this review and analysis, UNHCR will develop workplans to address the identified gaps." It hopes to have the process completed by the end of this year.
When it comes to adopting a "risk-management" approach to its partners in relief operations, as the auditors recommended, UNHCR says it first must adopt a "Differentiated Risk-Based Framework" and then apply it appropriately. The agency projects, somewhat murkily, that the "overall development application of the Framework will be completed by 2014."
Click here to read the 'Measures Taken' report.
Asked by Fox News last week whether it was on track to meet the many promised deadlines in its "measures taken" report, UNHCR had not replied before this article was published.
George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell
Monday, November 7, 2011
@HelenClarkUNDP fails to disclose her assets - @Rgrynspan seem more ethical than Uncle Helen - FoxNEws publishes scandal
@undpwatchundpwatch
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HelenClarkUNDP Helen Clark · UnfollowI'm Administrator@UNDP and former Prime Minister of#NewZealand, passionate about human#developmentworld-wide.
I'm Associate Administrator@UNDPand former Vice-President of#CostaRica, passionate about human#development world-wide.
Helen Clark fails to disclose her assets/finances - UNDP's Deputy Grynspan more ethical than uncle Helen - FoxNews publishes scandal
U.N. Officials Reluctant to Disclose Financial Assets (click for story on FoxNews)
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon encourages disclosure, but officials are hesitant to embrace transparency
After he first took office in late 2006, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proudly proclaimed that he was willing to disclose his private financial assets and other interests -- and urged his top officials to follow suit.
To make that easier, he created a public website where the U.N.’s senior officials -- under secretaries general and assistant secretaries general -- could post highly sanitized versions of the confidential financial disclosure statements they were required -- as of May 2006 -- to file with the U.N. Ethics Office in connection with their jobs.
The decision to participate was voluntary, Ban said. Nonetheless, he declared, such public disclosure was important “as it demonstrates that U.N. staff members understand the importance of the general public and U.N. member states being assured that, in the discharge of their official duties and responsibilities, staff members will not be influenced by any consideration associated with his/her private interests.”
If the aim of the website is to provide, as Ban says, assurance that U.N. officials are not influenced by private concerns, there is a lot not to be assured about.
Using an official list of the 185 top-ranking officials in the United Nations, Fox News has calculated that just fewer than half -- about 90 -- have made the voluntary disclosure statements urged by Ban five years ago.
The 2010 declarations actually refer to financial interests held by officials in the previous year. Thus, some of Ban’s highest-level appointees, even if they have held office for more than a year, do not appear on the website, if they did not hold their jobs in 2009.
In fact, the real ratio is substantially lower than that -- more like one-third. Reason: Ban offered his top officials an easier way out, if they chose, which would count as equivalent to public disclosure: a public declaration that they were choosing not to disclose -- a kind of opaque transparency, as it were, that the U.N. apparently considers a valid participation in Ban’s confidence-building effort. More than 20 officials took that route.
Despite that virtual freebie, about 44 percent of the U.N.’s top officialdom have ignored the website and Ban’s example entirely, at least for 2010, the most recent year online. A smaller number of top appointees won’t be eligible to file until next year.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE WEBSITE
While Ban has made much of the fact that he and his deputy secretary general, Asha-Rose Migiro, have voluntarily filed their finances, some of those absent from the website are nearly as important.
CLICK HERE FOR BAN’S DISCLOSURE FORM
Among them:
-- Helen Clark, the head Administrator of the powerful United Nations Development Program, the U.N.’s anti-poverty flagship. Clark’s No. 2, Associate Administrator Rebeca Grynspan, has filed a reasonably detailed statement.
--Lynn Pascoe, the U.N.’s under secretary general for political affairs.
--Robert Orr, an Assistant Secretary General responsible for policy planning.
A number of $1-a-year U.N. appointees, including Ban-appointed special envoys and representatives who nonetheless hold U.N. rankings equivalent to under secretary general and assistant secretary general, have also held out.
One of them is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Ban’s special envoy for Haiti. Questions from Fox News to Clinton’s office about his absence from the list, sent on November 2, had not been answered before this article was published.
Another is Jeffrey Sachs, Ban’s high-profile special adviser for the Millennium Development Goals and a major fundraiser for all U.N. anti-poverty activities.
Most of the forms that were actually filed as a disclosure of financial interest offer such cursory statements under assets as “house, joint with family members,” “ mutual funds,” or unspecified numbers of shares in often unspecified companies.
One high official, Ad Melkert, most recently Ban’s powerful special representative for Iraq, and previously associate administrator of UNDP, lists as his sole asset “Boat, U.S.A.”
Most forms list no liabilities, except for the occasional mortgage. The same goes for outside board memberships.
Indeed, the most common word on all of the public disclosure forms is “nil.”
Ban himself had no comment on the success of the voluntary disclosure effort or the participation of his officials when queried by Fox News.
George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter@GeorgeRussell.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/11/07/un-senior-officials-reluctant-to-disclose-financial-relationships-and-assets/#ixzz1d1s0mHTs
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