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POLITICS: UN Aims to Shed Culture of Corruption

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 15 2006 (IPS) - As the United Nations continues to battle waste, mismanagement and corruption, an outgoing senior U.N. 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.

U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Management Chris Burnham told reporters Wednesday that incoming Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has already pledged to sign a financial disclosure form – and also go public with it.

Ban, the former South Korean foreign minister who takes over as U.N. secretary-general in January, will succeed Kofi Annan, who completes his ten-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 U.S. 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,” he declared.

Burnham said the U.S. 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 U.N. 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 U.N. procurement officers,” Burnham said.

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

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

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

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

Burnham said he was “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 wrong doing.”

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

According to guidelines laid down by Annan, “all (U.N.) 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 U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) that are subject to confidentiality requirements.

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

But as of now, 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.

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 United Nations include findings of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the now-defunct, scandal-plagued, multi-billion-dollar U.N. 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 U.N. management reform, released last March.

The oil-for-food investigations found over 10 billion dollars in illicit funds and kickbacks funneled to Iraqi officials by companies bidding for U.N. contracts, for the supply of food and medicine to Iraqis subjected to U.N. economic sanctions.

In January this year, the United Nations also suspended eight officials – and sent them on “special leave without pay” – following allegations of wrong-doing, primarily relating to procurement.

In early November, one of the procurement officers was arrested on charges of steering over 50 million dollars 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 which received the U.N. contracts.

And in August another high ranking U.N. procurement official was arrested and has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and money laundering.