Lax U.N. oversight of the international fund to pay Afghan National Police salaries has contributed to the diversion of up to $200 million by Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry for questionable practices, and U.S. watchdogs say they’re eager to tighten up accountability before the program moves into its next phase in January.
The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction on Monday released correspondence among Special Inspector General John F. Sopko, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan and the U.N. Development Programing outlining the agency’s concerns about administration of the fund, to which the U.S. has contributed roughly $3.17 billion since 2002.
Sopko’s letters raise concerns about fraud in the program, known as the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, that includes inflated salaries, questionable payments to possible ghost employees and dubious “deductions” from police salaries from the Interior Ministry for taxes and pensions.
“We’ve been concerned with these issues for months,” a SIGAR official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner.
On Sept. 12, Sopko wrote U.N. Development Program Administrator Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand, saying her agency’s response to the U.S. concerns was “disturbingly ambiguous” and “reinforces my view that UNDP is not taking a proactive approach to oversight of this important reconstruction fund.”
In a Sept. 29 response, UNDP Associate Administrator Maria Eugenia Casar noted that some of the concerns were outside the limitations on the agency’s oversight of the Afghan fund.
“UNDP is in the process of contracting an international company, planned to start in October 2014, to conduct a scoping study of the payroll process and provide recommendations to all partners which will guide the preparation of LOFTA Phase VII scheduled to start in January 2015,” she wrote.
“The recommendations from the scoping study will bring partners together in improving the payroll process and suggest further improvements on the way forward.”
The SIGAR official said his agency would be meeting with UNDP officials later this week on the matter, and was eager to resolve accountability issues quickly because talks already are underway for the next phase of the program.
“The inspector general is anxious to convey that we’d like to keep our visibility high on that,” the official said. “We think the system can be tightened up more than it is now.”
Editor’s note: This story, originally posted at 11:22 a.m., has been updated.
