Volcker set to call for reform of UN leadership

By Mark Turner 
September 5 2005 
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ac22b9a8-1e4d-11da-a470-00000e2511c8.html
The UN’s leadership needs comprehensive and urgent reform following a failure of management in Iraq’s oil-for-food programme, the Volcker inquiry is expected to say this week.
“The main conclusions are unambiguous,” says a copy of the committee’s summary, seen in advance by the Financial Times. “The organisation requires stronger executive leadership, thoroughgoing administrative reform, and more reliable controls and auditing.” The report says “ethical lapses” and weakness in the programme’s management were “symptomatic of systematic problems in the UN administration generally”.
It warns that the UN’s ability to do its job depends on its maintaining an image of competence, honesty and accountability. “It is precisely those qualities that too often were absent in the administration of the oil-for-food programme.”
The findings are likely to come as a powerful new blow to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan’s managerial reputation, only days before dozens of world leaders gather for a UN summit in New York.
The report says Mr Annan is widely respected for playing the role of “chief diplomatic and political agent of the UN”, but that those responsibilities have became all consuming. Most notable is a “grievous absence of effective auditing and management control” as well as a “palpable absence of authority for the auditors and the lack of clear, if any, reporting lines to ‘the top’.” Steps by the General Assembly to improve accountability are “far short of what is needed”.
Whether the UN summit of world leaders will fix that is another matter. Many developing countries are resisting giving the secretariat more executive power, in return for greater accountability.
Many UN staff are also resisting change. “Entrenched interests inside the organization are in retreat but are not defeated,” Mr Malloch Brown, UN chief of staff, recently told Foreign Policy. “There is a tremendous, seething resistance in the organization, a wish that all this would go away and that it could settle back into comfortable mediocrity again.”