Watchdog attacks UN profligacy

A STINGING in-house report on bureaucratic excess and corruption at the United Nations has been delivered to the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros- Ghali. The report speaks of 'almost surreal' budget practices and 'chronically fragmented and inadequate' internal audits, which are failing to prepare the UN for the new demands on it to provide global leadership.

One UN unit responsible for internal supervision has became 'a convenient patronage dumping ground', and recently spent dollars 4m ( pounds 2.8m) on a study of managing works of art at the New York headquarters, the report says.

A spokesman for Mr Boutros- Ghali said the Secretary-General had no immediate comment on the report, which has not been made public. He said it was the first time Mr Boutros-Ghali had seen such allegations written down by the report's author, Dick Thornburgh, who has served for the past year as the UN's corruption watchdog.

The spokesman said he had not read the report, a copy of which has been seen by the Independent, but believed there must be something 'severely wrong' with the figure for the art works. 'I think it's ludicrous,' he said.

Dropping the usual diplomatic language of in-house documents, Mr Thornburgh wrote that the UN was 'almost totally lacking in effective means to deal with fraud, waste and abuse by staff members'. His team found that the UN employs 500 typists to transcribe dictation from translators because it had failed to install modern translation word-processors. The report estimates that about dollars 20m could be saved by installing new machines.

Fighting corruption and excessive fat in the UN bureaucracy has been one of Mr Boutros-Ghali's stated goals since he became Secretary-General in 1991. He cut about one-quarter of the high- level jobs and started to trim back the secretariat's 14,000 members.

However, in recent times the Secretary-General has been overloaded with work on peace-keeping and humanitarian aid missions, and his reforming zeal has cooled somewhat when confronted with the conflicting demands of the UN bureaucracy, Western diplomats say.

In the report, Mr Thornburgh says 'defects exist in nearly every aspect of personnel practice', and recruitment is 'more or less haphazard'. It is difficult to get rid of 'dead wood', he says. 'Discipline and dismissal procedures are encumbered by seemingly interminable appeals processes.' The result is that a 'few good staff members are doing too much, and over-extending themselves sometimes to the point where they have become counter-productive'.

One of the 'major disappointments' of his year at the UN, Mr Thornburgh says, was a failure

to devise a new performance- evaluation system. The present system was 'virtually useless' and produced positive assessments for 90 per cent of the staff.