Is Joseph Torsella blowing the whistle on UN corruption and mismanagement ? Is he becoming another Mark Wallace?

U.S. Diplomats Growing Frustrated at United Nations' Budget Games

By George Russell

Published October 07, 2011

| FoxNews.com

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/10/07/us-diplomats-blow-whistle-on-united-nations-budget-games/#ixzz1aOB1fAnA

U.S. diplomats at the United Nations are getting vocal in their frustration over smoke-and-mirrors numbers-juggling by the U.N. Secretariat, which says it is making financial cutbacks for 2012-2013, when it isn’t.

The frustrations, spurred in part by a restive Congress that is considering legislation that would drastically revamp the way the U.S. finances its share of the U.N. bill, are likely to get worse.

Among other things, Fox News has learned that the U.N. bureaucracy has decided to turn a deaf ear to a U.S. demand that it roll back an “inappropriate” 3 percent cost-of-living pay hike for its top officials this year, even while the U.S. bureaucracy suffers through a two-year pay freeze imposed by President Barack Obama.

Joseph Torsella, the U.S. ambassador for reform at the U.N., confirmed the U.N. decision to Fox News, while vowing to pursue the roll-back during this year’s U.N. General Asembly session, if need be, “with the aim of getting a true salary freeze through the G.A.”

Fox News revealed the existence of the pay hike on September 1, just five months after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ordered his top officials to cut their budgets by 3 percent in the face of a financial “emergency situation” facing the world body.

Click here for more on that story from Foxnews.com

There are no official estimates available for the overall cost of the pay hike, Torsella said, but the “back-of-the-envelope” U.S. calculation is that it would add another $10 million or so to a U.N. budget that is already a lot bigger than U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s officials want the world to think it is.

Torsella himself blew the whistle on the U.N.’s budget games on September 29, in a speech where he said the U.N. Secretariat’s proposed $5.2 “regular” budget for 2012-2013, was “simply loosening our belt a little less than we originally planned.”

Ban’s officials had said the new budget represented a 3 percent cut from its predecessor, and was fitting for “the austere times we are living in and the constraints that the global financial crisis has imposed on Member States.”

Torsella replied that it was no such thing. The same budget documents, he noted, revealed that “re-costing” and other measures already planned for the budget would bring the total to more like $5.5 billion—in other words, a more than 2 percent hike.

“That does not represent a break from business as usual,” he declared, “but rather a continuation of it.”

The U.S. pays 22 percent of the U.N.’s regular budget, which would put Washington’s portion of the proposed “regular” tally at about $1.21 billion.

Overall, the U.S. spent at least $7.7 billion on the sprawling global U.N. array of organizations last year, up from $6.35 billion the previous year—an increase of more than 21 per cent.

“Ambassador Torsella’s statement is long overdue,” says Brett Schaefer, an expert on U.N. financing at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “For over two years, the Obama Administration has refused to challenge the U.N. over its stalled reform agenda and its enormous budget increases.”

Indeed, as Torsella also pointed out, the “regular” U.N. budget has grown “dramatically, relentlessly, and exponentially,” from $2.6 billion in 2001-2002, to $5.4 billion in 2010-2011.

“This growth,” he added, “has significantly outpaced the growth of the budgets of almost all the Member States that comprise the U.N.”

The same can be said of U.N. salaries. As Torsella also noted, the average total compensation of U.N. employees contained in the biennial budget is about $238,000—or $119,000 a year, tax-free.

And when it comes to cutting staff, the austerity budget proposed by Ban’s office manages to cut a total of 44 jobs out of a staff of more than 10,200.

Hidden behind even those minuscule staffing cuts, however, is another U.N. numbers game. At the same time as it sliced more than 140 jobs largely from the U.N.’s General Service category, which includes secretarial and other clerical help, the Secretariat added and upgraded jobs in its more expensive professional and executive categories, a condition that the U.N.’s main budget advisory committee calls “grade creep.”

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the creepage is the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), which gets 13 new expensive jobs added, plus upgrades to 5 more.

The convoluted rationale: UNRWA’s largely voluntary overall funding is in crisis, which requires that the agency be “strengthened” through the addition of the fully-funded U.N. regular budget jobs.

But if anything, Torsella’s “business-as-usual” condemnation of the U.N.’s spending habits are still a wild understatement. The true U.N. Secretariat budget for the next two years is much, much more than $5.5 billion, as revealed in the same budget documents that Torsella was referencing in his complaint.

Alongside the “regular” budget paid from dues, far more of the Secretariat’s funding comes from so-called “extra-budgetary” or “voluntary” spending, which Ban’s officials project—on page 29 of the introductory budget document-- will total more than $12.44 billion, or 2 ½ times the amount of the “regular budget.”

That would bring the total Secretariat budget to just under $18 billion—roughly $821 million more than the same tally in the previous budget for 2010-2011, and a 4.8 percent increase overall.

Click here to view the real U.N. budget document.

It also makes the U.N.’s highly touted “regular” budget only about 28 percent—little more than a quarter—of the real total.

Figuring out the U.S. share of the true Secretariat budget is a difficult exercise, as Washington’s contribution is spread across a wide variety of programs and even portions of other, ostensibly separate U.N. organizations, whose headquarters costs are nonetheless contained in the Secretariat’s overall total.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell.

UN Tribunal Awards Compensation to Long-Suffering UNDP Whistleblower

Government Accountability Project

by Shelley Walden on September 01, 2010 ( The Whistleblogger / 2010 )

Yesterday, United Nations Dispute Tribunal Judge Memooda Ebrahim-Carstens issued a judgment in the long pending case of Artjon Shkurtaj, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) whistleblower who made much publicized disclosures regarding UNDP wrongdoing at its North Korean office. The judge ordered Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to award Shkurtaj fourteen months’ net base salary as compensation for the failure of the ad hocExternal Independent Investigative Review Panel (EIIRP) – appointed by UNDP to investigate the case – to allow Shkurtaj to comment on adverse findings contained in its publicly released report.

According to the decision:

Even if the EIIRP did not identify the applicant as the subject of its investigation, its report contained significant adverse findings about his credibility, trustworthiness and integrity. The Tribunal finds that not only was the applicant not given an opportunity to respond to these adverse findings, he was not even made aware of the EIIRP’s concerns regarding his credibility at any point prior to the issuance of the report. The Tribunal is persuaded by the applicant’s argument that the report of the EIIRP contained adverse findings against him and that, in the particular circumstances of this case, he should have been made aware of them prior to the issuance of the report and provided with the opportunity to comment on them and provide his explanations. Therefore, the Ethics Office’s finding that there was a violation of the applicant’s procedural right to be made aware of—and to have the opportunity to respond to—the adverse findings concerning his credibility and trustworthiness was reasonable and justified. This is particularly so considering the report was made public, following which there was no further process made available to the applicant to contest these findings. This failure resulted in a violation of the applicant’s due process rights, damaged his career prospects and professional reputation, and caused him emotional distress, for all of which he should be compensated. (para. 47)

The Judge also ordered the respondent to pay an additional $5,000 as compensation for its inordinate delay in considering the UN Ethics Office’s June 2008 decision in Shkurtaj’s case. According to Judge Ebrahim-Carstens, “to date, i.e. in over two years, UNDP has not made a decision on the Ethics Office’s recommendation to compensate the applicant as stated in its report dated 27 June 2008.”Again, according to the ruling:

The referral of the report to the Ethics Office for recommendations was part of UNDP’s effort to carry out a fair and objective fact-finding exercise and this referral was meant to be meaningful, particularly considering the history of this case. The undertaking by UNDP was to share EIIRP’s findings with the Director of the Ethics Office, who ‘could then provide an opinion and formulate recommendations, as may be appropriate, on the retaliation allegations in light of these findings’. This meant that, having submitted to the process, UNDP was required to give serious and timeous consideration to the Ethics Office’s comments and recommendations, make a decision on them and provide this decision, along with the reasons, to the applicant. There is no evidence before me that UNDP afforded such timeous and serious consideration to the Ethics Office’s recommendation. (para. 48)

For Shkurtaj, the past four years have been an ordeal of retaliation, harassment and defamation. Tuesday’s ruling represents a remarkable advance toward justice for UN whistleblowers. Because of this decision, management in the United Nations system are on notice that staff members’ rights can no longer be violated without consequences.

At the same time, however, GAP remains concerned about the way in which Shkurtaj’s retaliation claims were handled. The Judge dismissed his claim that the organization failed to enforce its ethics policy and protect him from retaliation.

The court’s decision begs the question: Why did the highest levels of UNDP management subject a staff member to such draconian measures, including a.) rescinding his appointment and terminating him; b.) directing the UN Department of Safety and Security to include his photo in an array of pictures used to bar threatening individuals from UN grounds and facilities; c.) launching an unprecedented ad hocinvestigation that defamed him; d.) ignoring all of the whistleblower protection procedures contained in Secretary-General bulletins 2005/21 and 2007/11, as well as UNDP’s own whistleblower protection policy issued in the fall of 2007; and e.) refusing to enforce the Ethics Office’s 2008 decision? These extreme actions have not been adequately explained. As Shkurtaj once told The Washington Post, “If I would not have spoken out, would any of this have ever happened?”

In arriving at her conclusion, the Judge stated that UNDP was

“required to act fairly towards the applicant, which meant that UNDP had to examine the concerns and allegations raised by the applicant, albeit not necessarily through the Ethics Office. The question, therefore, is whether the applicant’s allegation that he had been retaliated against was adequately and objectively reviewed… I see no reason warranting a conclusion that the report of the EIIRP and the subsequent review by the Ethics Office were anything but thorough and objective.”(para. 43, 45)

GAP, which has periodically advised Shkurtaj throughout his ordeal, strongly disagrees with the Judge’s analysis of the EIIRP review. The conduct of the EIIRP demonstrated a lack of expertise in whistleblower cases and of the impartiality needed to investigate retaliation disclosures properly. For example, the panel demonstrated its ignorance of the relevant standard of proof in a whistleblower case. UNDP failed to establish that its action rescinding Shkurtaj’s appointment as Operations Manager of its North Korea office, after he reported wrongdoing, was not retaliatory. Under the UNDP whistleblower protection policy, once Shkurtaj had been designated a whistleblower and made a prima facie case of retaliation, UNDP had to prove with “clear and convincing evidence” that it did not retaliate. But UNDP presented no substantive evidence at all, other than the statement of the officer responsible for the withdrawal of Shkurtaj’s appointment. In short, at this point in the proceedings, Shkurtaj did not have to prove that the withdrawal of the appointment was retaliatory. UNDP had to prove that it was not. Any objective review would reach this conclusion.

Similarly, the panel, which was selected by then UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis and included a member of a UNDP advisory board, lacked the impartiality needed to investigate retaliation disclosures properly. In the words of GAP International Program Director Bea Edwards, “If you are the defendant you can't be the judge and jury.”

It should be noted that Mr. Shkurtaj’s disclosures and his cooperation with the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, NY Southern District Attorney’s office and the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations resulted in the U.S. government gaining important intelligence on the DPRK’s manipulation of UNDP. The Subcommittee’s investigative report concluded that

“the DPRK government used its relationship with the United Nations to execute deceptive financial transactions by moving $2.72 million of its own funds from Pyongyang to DPRK diplomatic missions abroad through a bank account intended to be used solely for UNDP activities and by referencing UNDPin the wire transfer documents.” The Subcommittee also “obtained evidence that UNDP transferred approximately $50,000 of UN funds to an entity called Zang Lok Trading Co. that a US State Department official later identified as having ‘ties to a North Korean entity that has been designated [by the US government] as the main North Korean financial agent for sales of conventional arms, ballistic missiles and goods related to the assembly and manufacture of such weapons.’” (p. 1)

According to the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,

“the facts presented in this Report might not have come to light absent the actions of a UNDP official, Artjon Shkurtaj, who repeatedly raised concerns about UNDP practices in North Korea. Rather than supporting Mr. Shkurtaj, UNDP declined to renew his employment contract. When he filed a complaint alleging retaliation, UNDP declined to submit voluntarily to an Ethics Office review, later referring the matter to an ad hoc review team. While the UN Secretary-General recently announced a new effort to strengthen whistleblower protections across the United Nations, that effort is in the early stages and has been the subject of some criticism. UN personnel should be able to blow the whistle on waste, fraud, or abuse without fear of retribution. Both Congress and the US State Department should continue to press for the implementation of strong whistleblower protections at the UNDP and throughout the United Nations.” (p. 5)

It remains to be seen whether or not the UNDT decision will be enforced or appealed. Meanwhile,UNDP’s whistleblower protections remain weak.

Shelley Walden is International Officer for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leadingwhistleblower advocacy organization.