By OREN DORELL
The United Nations could lose tens of millions of dollars a year for its operations if it does not create a program to protect employees who blow the whistle on U.N. corruption, an independent watchdog group says.
The Government Accountability Project, a transparency advocate that focuses on the United Nations, has been pushing for years for countries to impose penalties on the U.N. for its failure to create a whistleblower protection program.
An appropriations bill passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law last month by President Obama requires the State Department to cut the U.S. annual contribution to the U.N. by 15% if the U.N. does not establish protections for employees who expose corruption.
Bea Edwards, executive director of the Government Accountability Project, said the new measure is needed because corruption problems at the U.N. are “quite widespread.” And the United States, which provides 22% of the U.N.’s total budget and is the largest single donor to the international body, is in a unique position to improve U.N. operations, she said.
The State Department was authorized to withhold the money since 2012, but it has not because it sought to avoid controversy, according to the Government Accountability Project. Under the new law, it must withhold the funds if there is no action.
The State Department says it reviewed the U.N.’s efforts and did join with other U.N. states to request that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon “expedite the development of strengthened protections against whistleblower retaliation,” and to create independent ethics offices in every U.N. agency for that purpose.
Exactly how much the U.N. risks losing is difficult to say. The last reliable number for how much the United States gives the U.N. for operations is $7.7 billion, which was given in fiscal year 2010.
The new law requiring a mandatory cut was prompted in part by retaliation by high-level U.N. officials against a U.N. employee who reported a $500 million kickback scheme for the construction of a power plant and coal mine in Kosovo.
“They wanted to destroy me personally and professionally,” said the former employee, James Wasserstrom, who had spent 28 years working for the United Nations.
“All major donors (to the U.N.) should demand that the U.N. stop playing around with the words ‘anti-corruption’ and go after high level officials involved in this,” said Wasserstrom, now a senior anti-corruption official for U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department at the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan.
Edwards’ organization worked with the U.N. to adopt a whistleblower policy, but the office has failed to take an effective stand to defend whistleblowers who report retaliation, Edwards said. Of 300 whistleblowers who reported retaliation to the U.N. ethics office from 2006 to 2011, the U.N. only only validated three cases, including Wasserstrom’s, Edwards said.
Wasserstrom says corruption and retaliation against whistleblowers at the U.N. “is systemic and (involves) collusion at the highest levels to protect the U.N.’s reputation.”
In Kosovo, Wasserstrom worked from 2002 to 2008 overseeing public utilities and handling corruption reports, the findings for which he would turn over his findings to the appropriate authorities.
When he received a report that a $5 billion project included $500 million in kickbacks to a list of officials including his own boss and a Kosovar minister, he notified the U.N.’s inspector general at the time, Inga-Britt Ahlenius.
But U.N. police arrested Wasserstom, searched his home and car. U.N. officials posted wanted posters outside his office and he was fired. The U.N. later called his treatment excessive but ruled it was not retaliation.
The U.N.’s Dispute Tribunal, its internal court, found otherwise and awarded Wasserstrom $50,000 in damages. But none of the people who engaged in the retaliatory behavior suffered any consequences, says Dylan Blaylock, a spokesman for the Government Accountability Project.
Edwards said the new requirement will help protect whistleblowers like Wasserstrom, who come forward with suspicions they may not be able to prove and are confronted with an institution that “desperately is trying to protect its senior management’s reputation.”