World Bulletin
President’s Corner: UN Oversight: Time to Learn and Move OnBy Ed Elmendorf
The recent raging public debate stimulated by the end-of-assignment report from Inga-Britt Ahlenius, the United Nations’ under secretary-general in charge of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, stimulates reflection on the lessons that can be learned and on the importance of moving on.
It’s fortunate that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acted quickly with the nomination of a successor, Carman Lapointe-Young of Canada, currently director of oversight at the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome and formerly chief auditor at the World Bank.
For those deeply concerned, as I am, with the effectiveness of the UN, Ahlenius’s report (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/nations2.pdf) and the comments of the Secretary-General’s chef de cabinet, Vijay Nambiar (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/nations.pdf), merit close reading beyond the dramatization of certain generalizations in the media. Together these documents demonstrate the important progress that has been made in institutionalizing oversight at the UN, as well as the good distance to go. Read together, they also reveal many of the tensions and stresses that surround the office of the secretary-general in his efforts to lead the UN in new directions and simultaneously ensure sound management, including transparency and accountability, in his Charter-mandated capacity as chief administrative officer of the UN.
A willing attitude among senior officials to listen and to build on adverse opinion based on evidence seems fundamental to the UN’s effectiveness. Yet, in an organization with people of widely varying cultural backgrounds and an institutional culture that sometimes seems to be defensive, this is a formidable challenge. Decades ago, when I served for several years as special assistant to a senior UN official, my boss in the Secretariat once told me that our job was to paper over the cracks. For the UN to succeed in the 21st century, this just isn’t good enough! Training and organization development interventions are widely needed, including at the most senior levels.
The Ahlenius report and the Nambiar commentary underscore the importance of practical operational independence in the work of the Office of Internal Oversight Services. Furthermore, independent financing needs to be assured for the office. The secretary-general should move to resolve the conflict between the role of the internal oversight office in examining budgeting and the budgeting function and the role of the UN’s budget manager in providing budget support for the office itself.
The UN’s Independent Audit Advisory Committee could certainly play an important role in this respect. In the World Bank, the conflict is resolved for the Independent Evaluation Group through a budget formula approved by the bank’s board, which fixes the group’s budget as a share of lending, without review by the bank’s budgeting staff. The UN could consider a similar practice.
Ahlenius, a Swede, observes a lack of clarity in the roles of the UN’s line managers, such as herself, and the UN’s human resources staff. In her view, this contributed to the delays in filling the critical post of director of the internal oversight office investigations. She perceives the Department of Management to consider itself in charge of management, yet she soundly points out that it is a service department intended to help line managers get their jobs done. Her idea of changing it to a support unit called Department of Management Support makes a lot of sense to me, as long as the title change is associated with further work to clarify the relative roles of the support department and the line units.
We should not be surprised to find that there are problems of role confusion of the type experienced by the internal oversight office. They certainly exist in national governments and existed in my time many years ago as a manager in the human resources function in the World Bank. End-of-assignment reports can be a valuable managerial tool. They did not exist in my days in the UN. The Ahlenius incident demonstrates both their value and the risk that they may be abused to score points. Let’s hope that the UN can draw effectively on their value and mitigate the risks.
Ed
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