Your tax dollars!
It’s not really so shocking, but what is shocking is that this news has been made public at all.
Here is the story from Fox News and reporter George Russell. I wanted to copy the whole article because every line of it is informative, but you will have to follow the link for more details. Remember as you read this that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is also choosing most of the refugees coming to your cities and towns. (emphasis below is mine)
EXCLUSIVE: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, two years ago was sitting on a stockpile of $437 million in unspent cash, even as a U.N. auditing agency warned that its sloppy handling of funds imperiled future contributions from U.N. member nations.
The report, issued last year but only introduced for member-state review in the U.N. General Assembly, cites UNHCR for sloppy bookkeeping, poor financial oversight, managerial disarray, and a lack of tools to judge how well it was doing its job of helping tens of millions of the world’s displaced people.
The U.N.’s independent Board of Auditors used remarkably straight-forward language to lambaste the refugee agency, whose largest donor, the United States, contributed $712 million to UNHCR in 2010, according to the State Department. The auditors noted that the relief agency, which is financed largely by voluntary contributions, spent about $1.9 billion in 2010; its budget two years earlier was about $1.1 billion.
The auditors pointed out that there were “strong indicators of significant shortcomings in financial management” at the agency, headed since 2005 by Antonio Guterres, a former Socialist prime minister of Portugal. “This is a major risk for UNHCR,” the auditors warned, “given the increasing pressures on donors to justify why they provide public funds to international aid organizations.”
Moreover, the inspectors did not seem optimistic that the situation would change soon, even though UNHCR’s management now says that it is working hard on a wide variety of fronts to change the disturbing situation.
The Board of Auditors report, written last year but only recently published, amounted to the first major external assessment of UNHCR’s behavior after its spending began to balloon dramatically in 2008 in line with a new strategy known as the Global Needs Assessment, a novel way to encourage donors to come up with more cash.
Increase in funding from US has come in Obama years. Redistribution of wealth?
The Obama administration has apparently found the Global Needs approach convincing. U.S. contributions to the relief agency increased by about 40 percent between 2008 and 2010.
Besides its high overhead for salaries and offices, the UNHCR was busy doling out a large chunk of your money to NGOs with little competition and oversight of how they used the money.
….roughly one-third of UNHCR’s spending ($667 million) went to “implementing partners,” meaning non-government organizations and others who carried out relief operations. Who they all were, and how well they functioned, was not at all clear. The process of selecting those partners, the auditors noted, “lacks rigor and transparency, increasing the risk of fraud, corruption, inefficiency and poor partner performance.”
All of you who are disgusted with this waste of your tax dollars should write to your US Senators and Representatives and tell them what you think! You might also contact Obama’s Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice on whose watch all this is happening.
And, if you need any more fuel in your fire, see this story yesterday about another UN agency that is going to investigate the US over Voter ID laws and determine whether they are racist! I am not kidding!
Stop funding the UN!