Bureaucratic disorganization, ill-defined duties, and too little oversight prevent the State Department arm charged with combating international drug crime from effectively managing $6 billion in foreign assistance.
The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs’ chaotic structure and incoherent policies have been noted in many of the 95 audits and inspections various watchdog agencies have launched in the past five years alone.
But the problems persist under detached leadership, according to a new State Department inspector general’s report.
As a result, “confusion” permeates the bureau at almost every level, the IG said. Top officials issued four new program guidelines and 92 new policies in a two-year span, prompting project delays as staff attempted to determine which rules they were supposed to follow.
With more than $1.1 billion in operational funding and offices in 40 countries, the bureau is designed to strengthen overseas police forces and judicial systems in combating narcotics smuggling.
The bureau also targets money laundering and drug trafficking around the world, relying on contractors to implement many of its international programs.
Its efforts are hampered, however, because the bureau’s offices are scattered widely and too often duplicate efforts and operate independently of senior management, the IG said.
While some responsibilities are duplicated among overlapping offices, others fall through the cracks due to the lack of defined roles for various branches.
IG auditors cited the Office of Policy, Planning, and Coordination as an example of the illogical bureaucratic structure because it is “not responsible for planning” and provides minimal policy insight.
A number of offices perform too many functions to be efficient. The report said contract acquisition, information technology, budgeting requests and security, among other responsibilities, all fall under the purview of a single office that could perform better if split into three entities.
Bureau officials, programs and offices have no set roles in relation to each other, creating the risk that “staff will attempt to act beyond their authority,” the report said.
The absence of guidance could also cause staff to hamper projects on the ground by giving contractors or foreign governments conflicting orders.
Because each office relies on its own system of implementing projects, planning for new efforts varies widely across different regions and countries.
The bureau has no way to alleviate “financial difficulties” or to satisfy potential congressional inquiries because documentation of the implementation approach officials took in each country is missing, the IG said.
Some branches, such as the Office of Western Hemisphere Programs, have solved problems that continue to plague others, but decline to share their best practices because the lines of communication among offices are largely closed.
Despite having reams of training documents and procedures, the bureau offers virtually no training to its new hires — many of whom have no prior experience in foreign assistance, the report said.
An online training course that hasn’t been updated in six years lowers “productivity and morale” among the staff members who attempt to apply the obsolete curriculum to their work.
A knowledgeable staff at the bureau’s working level could be especially helpful given the lack of direction from above. Senior officials rarely convey their decisions to lower offices or document the internal deliberations that led to them, according to the IG.
“The result is duplication of effort, inconsistent communication, lack of decision records, and the absence of the Assistant Secretary’s voice,” the IG said. But documentation is missing from other areas of the bureau as well.
Program officials don’t consistently track their programs’ progress, and some even neglect to establish benchmarks of any kind.
Although the bureau claimed performance data was used to inform its most recent annual budget request, IG auditors could not determine whether or how results supported the requested funds.
“No evidence from specific program monitoring and evaluations is included,” IG auditors said of the budget.
A May 2012 report from the Government Accountability Office attributed the scarcity of performance assessments to the bureau’s “culture,” which seemingly discourages evaluation.
Contracting processes also go largely undocumented, the IG said. Although the bureau hands out many grants without allowing competition, it seldom records the reasons why. Nearly a third of the 250 non-competitive grants the bureau awarded last year were “poorly justified.”
Some of the bureau’s complications emanate from its parent agency. The State Department requires all of its bureaus to rely on the same automated budgeting systems, which are so inadequate that staff have to compile makeshift accounting databases by hand, the report said.
Even though the department forces its various units to use these financial management systems, the programs are incapable of tracking information its own comptroller “routinely requests,” the IG said.
The bureau struggles to keep up with the amount of available project funds it can shift to other areas of the budget before they expire. The bureau had to return $58 million to the Treasury Department at the end of 2013, the IG said.
