U.N. Looking at Charges of Fraud in Procurement 
By Warren Hoge
January 24, 2006
The New York Times
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/international/24nations.html

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 23 - The United Nations management chief said Monday that an investigation of the purchase of equipment for peacekeeping operations had turned up more than 200 allegations of fraud amounting to tens of millions of dollars.
The official, Christopher B. Burnham, the under secretary general for management, said an audit by the United Nations' internal watchdog had turned up significant evidence of abuse and had led to the suspension with pay of eight officials from the offices of peacekeeping and management.
He said that much of the information was furnished by staff members and that there was anecdotal evidence that a new whistleblower protection policy had made them willing to come forward now.
Clearly, I think the potential abuse could go into the tens of millions of dollars, and it could go higher than that, Mr. Burnham said. But we're in the middle of looking at 200 different cases, reports, and if the men and women of the United Nations continue to show the courage they have in the last six months, in the next six months I expect that figure to go up.
The new findings emerged as the United Nations was being challenged to overhaul its management structure and practices to avoid repetition of the kind of failure in running the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program in Iraq that so undermined the organization.
It's very disturbing, John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, said of the new report. It shows the sad record of mismanagement that we're trying to deal with through the reform process.
He said that it's not just simply this incident or that incident of corruption or mismanagement, but a culture problem that we're facing here. He pointed out that the United States had paid 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget.
The investigation by the Office of Internal Oversight Services follows a guilty plea in Federal District Court in Manhattan last August by Aleksandr V. Yakovlev, a United Nations procurement officer, to charges of bribing contractors and a report from Deloitte Consulting last month that found the procurement office badly managed and vulnerable to fraud.
Mr. Burnham, an American who was the State Department's chief financial officer until taking up his present post in June, said that the United Nations was being proactive in pursuing the cases.
He declined to identify the suspended officials, but two who have been cited by news agencies, Andrew Toh, who heads the Office of Central Support Services, and Christian Saunders, the Procurement Division chief, have denied any impropriety.
Mr. Burnham said the measures were administrative rather than disciplinary and did not presume any wrongdoing.
He said Secretary General Kofi Annan was absolutely leading this effort to insure that we are executing the best practices as we ferret out corruption and fraud and abuse here at the United Nations.
Asked if he endorsed that view, Mr. Bolton, a frequent critic of Mr. Annan's stewardship of the United Nations, said, I'm glad that Chris Burnham is under secretary general for management.