Another failed UN unit--internal investigations

Washington Post:

The United Nations' internal investigation division has been plagued by leadership that demoralized its investigators and stymied the group's ability to function effectively as an anti-corruption watchdog, according to two confidential U.N. reviews.

The management culture in the investigations division has been so dysfunctional, the author of one of the reviews wrote last summer, that the division should be shut down and replaced.

"A command and control, fear-inducing, top-down management style served as the basis for day-to-day operations" in the investigations division, Erling Grimstad, a former Norwegian prosecutor, wrote in a confidential June 2007 review commissioned by the head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, of which the investigations division is a part.

"There was an almost obsessive focus on confidentiality and a lack of transparency . . . which gave people outside . . . the impression that it was being directed as an intelligence service" that instilled a "culture of fear and insecurity," Grimstad's report said.

His report and another by Michel Girodo, a Canadian management consultant, which were obtained by The Washington Post, were critical of the U.N.'s former top investigator, Barbara Dixon, an American lawyer who ran the unit from 1995 to 2006, and the agency's Vienna-based deputy director, Mark Gough of Australia. As Gough resigned last month, he told his staff in an e-mail that he disagreed with planned changes, according to a U.N. official.

Dixon responded that the reports are riddled with inaccuracies that raise questions about their "credibility." Karl Paschke, a German national who hired Dixon in 1995 to lead the division, said he had the "highest regard" for her performance. "That does not sound as if they are talking about the Barbara Dixon that I know," he said.

The Office of Internal Oversight Services was created in 1994 to investigate corruption, fraud and other violations of U.N. rules. It includes an audit unit and an investigations division, which came under criticism in the reports for failing to uncover corruption.

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Let's see, what has happened at the UN since 1994? How about the biggest bribery scandal in the history of the world--oil for food, which was uncovered by outsiders and required an outside auditor to unravel. Yeah, I would say their internal investigations are worthless.