/ 16 November 2006

Newly transparent UN enters the future

As the United Nations continues to battle waste, mismanagement and corruption, an outgoing senior official has proposed that all high-level UN staffers should not only disclose their private financial assets but also make them public. Outgoing Secretary General Kofi Annan Annan signed his financial disclosure forms last month.

As the United Nations continues to battle waste, mismanagement and corruption, an outgoing senior UN official has proposed that all high-level staffers in the world body should not only disclose their private financial assets but also make them public.

UN under-secretary general for management Chris Burnham told reporters on Wednesday that incoming secretary general Ban Ki-moon has already pledged to sign a financial disclosure form — and to go public with it.

Ban, the former South Korean foreign minister who takes over as UN chief in January, will succeed Kofi Annan, who completes his 10-year, two-term tenure at the end of December.

Annan signed his financial disclosure forms last month but they have not been made public.

”I think this is a new era for the United Nations,” said Burnham, a former United States State Department official who leaves the world body later this week to join the private sector. ”We are bringing the United Nations into the 21st century — in terms of accountability, transparency, ethics, efficiency and effectiveness.”

Burnham said the US government, and dozens of governments throughout the world, including South Korea, have made it mandatory that all civil servants make information about their financial assets available to public scrutiny.

Addressing reporters, he said: ”I would encourage you to suggest that making financial disclosure forms public at the level of the secretary general alone is too limiting.”

In the future, he said, all senior officials, including under-secretaries general and assistant secretaries general, should make their personal financial information public, as should staffers dealing with UN procurement worldwide.

”We also have to focus on a history of individuals who have been involved in procurement leaving this institution and going to work for companies in the midst of bidding for projects they were dealing in while they were UN procurement officers,” Burnham said.

He also pointed out that his office has laid down rigid post-employment restrictions on UN staffers leaving the organisation.

Asked what advice he would give to the incoming secretary general, Burnham said: ”Stay the course.”

Disclosure

Meanwhile, as a result of the new ethical guidelines, more than 2 000 staffers have signed disclosure forms in the UN system worldwide, compared with about 200 last year.

The newly created UN Ethics Office, which came into existence last January, has pledged to protect whistleblowers against retaliation for reporting fraud and malfeasance in the UN system around the world.

Burnham said he is ”really proud” of the new whistleblower protection policy because ”it is the strongest in the world”.

”We will soon have a culture that will not lie or cheat — and that will not tolerate those who do so. And we should support men and women of courage who come forward to expose wrongdoing.”

Under the new financial disclosure system, the value of gifts that UN staffers will be required to declare has been slashed to $250, from $10 000.

According to guidelines laid down by Annan, ”all [UN] offices and staff members shall cooperate with the Ethics Office and provide access to all records and documents requested by it”.

The exceptions to this are medical records that are not available without the express consent of the staff member concerned, and records of the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services that are subject to confidentiality requirements.

Tunku Abdul Aziz, a UN special adviser and head of the Ethics Office, told reporters last May that in the past UN staffers ”were merely expected to comply with the rules and regulations governing their service”.

But from now on, they will be ”persuaded and encouraged to go beyond mere compliance and to understand the true nature of public duty in the public interest, with all that it implies”, said Tunku Aziz, a co-founder of the Malaysian chapter of the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International.

Ethical and accountable

Annan says that a key ingredient of any successful organisation is ”an ethical and accountable culture pervading its staff, from top to bottom”. Unfortunately, ”in recent years it has become clear that we have too often fallen short of these high standards”.

Since Annan took over in 1997, about 40 staff members have been summarily dismissed. And one of those was on procurement-related issues.

The recent negative disclosures against the UN include findings of the independent inquiry committee into the now-defunct, scandal-plagued, multibillion-dollar UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and ”the absolutely impermissible acts of sexual exploitation by some of our peacekeepers”, Annan said in his 43-page landmark report on UN management reform, released last March.

The oil-for-food investigations found more than $10-billion in illicit funds and kickbacks funnelled to Iraqi officials by companies bidding for UN contracts, for the supply of food and medicine to Iraqis subjected to UN economic sanctions.

In January this year, the UN also suspended eight officials — and sent them on ”special leave without pay” — following allegations of wrongdoing, primarily relating to procurement.

In early November, one of the procurement officers was arrested on charges of steering more than $50-million in contracts to a company in India in return for a New York apartment purchased at below market rates. The apartment was owned by the head of the Indian company that received the UN contracts.

And in August another high-ranking UN procurement official was arrested and has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and money laundering. — IPS