INVESTING IN THE UNITED NATIONS
For a Stronger Organization Worldwide
Report of the Secretary-General
VI. Investing in governance
81. In sections II to V, I have described the major changes that I believe are needed in the management of the United Nations Secretariat and the resources entrusted to it by Member States. In the present section, I shall suggest improvements in the way the Secretariat explains itself to Member States and to thepublic, and the way Secretariat and Member States work together on managementand budgetary issues. My objective is to ensure that Member States receive highquality, accurate and timely reports on the Secretariat's performance, and have in their hands effective tools for holding the Secretariat genuinely accountable for its fulfilment of their mandates and stewardship of their resources. The United Nations should be accessible to its owners — the Member States — and to its users — all who rely on its services or have dealings with it. This requires an effort of transparency on the part of the Secretariat, but also requires some adjustment by the intergovernmental bodies themselves.
Context and challenges
82. The present budgeting and decision-making processes are characterized by an acute lack of clarity and transparency. Member States are subjected to a blizzard of reports from the Secretariat, which contain a great deal of information but are not arranged strategically and are therefore of very limited use as analyticaltools. The Fifth Committee, in particular, currently receives over 270 reports each year, none of which gives a single, comprehensive and coordinated view of Secretariat management performance. This plethora of reports overwhelms both the Secretariat and the Member States alike (see figure 6). It obliges Member States to probe officials with very detailed questions in an effort, which even then is only partly successful, to get at the full picture. Reports are too long, there are too many of them and they often arrive late, leaving Member States too little time to review them.
83. The public, too, is ill served by current United Nations policy on outside access to documentation. This policy is neither clear nor systematic. Existing rules establish a theoretical presumption in favour of releasing documents to the public on request but do not set forth precise criteria for deciding when access should be refused. In practice, individual department or office heads take these decisions on an ad hoc basis, with no review or appeal process for people who feel that access to a given document has been wrongly denied.
84. The current system of interaction between the Secretariat and Committees of the General Assembly is at times dysfunctional because the different committees are too numerous, too large and often have overlapping agendas. In particular:
- The Fifth Committee's interface with the Secretariat suffers from excessive focus on details. This is partly due to the size of the Committee (191 members) and partly to the lack of time limits on discussion, which prevent a strategic dialogue and frequent head of mission involvement;
- The Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ), which gives expert technical advice to the Fifth Committee, also spends much of its time on a parallel and detailed line-by-line cross-examination of officials, again without always reaching a strategic judgement. So often the same ground is covered — once in ACABQ and again in the Fifth Committee;
- The Committee for Programme and Coordination absorbs significant resources and time but no longer fulfils either its mandate of coordinating the activities of different programmes under the regular budget or its mandate of assessing the performance of the Secretariat. Earlier efforts to reform it have proved unsuccessful.
Vision
85. My vision is one of Member States and Secretariat working together, on the following terms:
- Workable decision-making processes. When discussing matters of detail, Member States would work in small but representative groups, keeping to a strict timetable and supported by knowledgeable expertise, with a clear mandate to approve or disapprove proposals so that larger bodies could focus on strategic issues;
- A clear division of labour. Intergovernmental bodies would govern the Organization in the sense of making high-level decisions on priorities, policies and the overall allocation of resources, and would provide substantive expert input. They would discharge these tasks better by leaving operational details to be managed by the Secretariat and judging managers on results rather than through a line-by-line review of each item of expenditure;
- A credible reporting mechanism. Member States would receive accurate and timely analysis and information from the Secretariat — as they need to more than ever now that it has so many more tasks to perform and demands to meet. This would be achieved not by more reports but by fewer, better and clearer reports that would enable Member States to evaluate Secretariat actions and ensure that their mandates were properly implemented;
- Transparency. The public would be told clearly that they could request United Nations Secretariat documents, how to make such requests and on what principles they would be granted or denied, and all such requests would receive a prompt response.
Proposals
Proposal 19
I propose to improve our reporting mechanisms by developing a single, comprehensive annual report, including comprehensive financial and programme information; identifying opportunities to streamline all Secretariat reports; making real-time financial performance reports available to Member States; and improving public access to United Nations documentation. More specifically:
- A single, comprehensive annual report of the Secretary-General to the General Assembly on the work of the Organization, as mandated by the Charter, will consolidate the information currently presented in five different reports, enabling the financial and operational work of the Secretariat to be readily measured against the strategic objectives set by Member States. It will thus not only improve the quality of communication between the Secretariat and Member States but also enable Member States to conduct more meaningful strategic discussions among themselves.
- Over 30 existing reports on management and finance issues will be consolidated into six reports.
- We will also provide Member States with real-time, consolidated accounts of our financial performance on a regular quarterly basis, as soon as the necessary information systems are in place.
- In May 2006, I shall submit to Member States, for discussion and approval, a detailed policy proposal containing new and clear rules on public access to United Nations documentation.
Proposal 20
I propose three new principles for interaction between the Secretariat and the key General Assembly budget committees:
- The committees should agree to focus on core budget issues, with emphasis on planning and the analysis of performance.
- Both plenary and working groups should respect strict time limits for budget discussion and decision-making.
- Plenary sessions should be used for decisions on core budget issues and not for prolonged debates on each line item.
Proposal 21
I urge the General Assembly to consider ways to reform its structures for interacting with the Secretariat on management and budgetary issues. Accordingly, while this is clearly a matter for them to decide, Member States may wish to:
- Reconsider the need for a separate Committee for Programme and Coordination given the extensive overlap of this Committee's work with that of the Fifth Committee and ACABQ.
- Establish a programme evaluation capacity to strengthen the ability of the Fifth Committee to review all $10 billion Secretariat resources and allow a linkage between programme performance and budget review.
- Raise the level of their representation on the Fifth Committee, encouraging heads of mission to participate more directly.
- Review the level of technical expertise required for service on ACABQ with a view to ensuring that it fully carries out its function as an expert group, supporting and advising the Fifth Committee.
- Elevate the agenda of both the Fifth Committee and ACABQ and impose time limits on their sessions with a view to spending less time on detailed review and more on key strategic issues.
- Examine ways to allow strategic discussion to be held in meetings of manageable size, possibly through dividing up the workload of the Fifth Committee among select working groups of limited membership, or consider whether an executive committee could be elected from among its members and asked to bring agreed recommendations before the Committee as a whole.
Box 2: Strengthening oversight and audit
Critical both to good management and to ensuring the highest standards of integrity and accountability is a system of proper oversight and audit. Currently, the United Nations is subject to multiple internal and external audit and review bodies — including the Board of Auditors, the Joint Inspection Unit and the Office of Internal Oversight Services — with varying and somewhat overlapping mandates and remits. In addition, the Office of Internal Oversight Services itself has a complex set of responsibilities that is subject to potential conflicts of interest between its role in providing management advisory services to United Nations departments and its investigatory and audit functions. This latter role, in which the Office of Internal Oversight Services has traditionally provided internal audits for use by senior management, has also become blurred as a result of the General Assembly's recent decision to have the Office report directly to Member States as well as to the Secretary- General, and to allow Member States direct access to its reports.
This complex set of arrangements, as well as the problems uncovered in the management of the oil-for-food programme, the sexual exploitation scandal in some of our peacekeeping missions and troubling evidence of misconduct in our procurement system has reinforced my long-standing conviction that the independent audit and investigatory capacity of the United Nations needs to be significantly strengthened. That is why I initially proposed a comprehensive review of the Office of Internal Oversight Services in 2004; and I repeated the request in my 2005 report to the General Assembly entitled “In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all” (A/59/2005). I was very pleased to see this proposal fully endorsed by Heads of State and Government in the 2005 World Summit Outcome [PDF, 283K], and I very much welcome the fact that they decided to combine this review with the comprehensive assessment of the governance arrangements of the United Nations already recommended by the Board of Auditors. By the same token, I was also very pleased by the General Assembly's decisions to approve significant new resources for the Office of Internal Oversight Services in both June and December 2005, and to endorse the creation of an Independent Audit Advisory Committee as an additional resource to ensure that Member States have the independent expert advice that they need in order to better exercise their oversight responsibilities.
In my report to the General Assembly in November 2005 on the implementation of the 2005 World Summit Outcome, I set out detailed terms of reference for this new Committee, based on a review of best practices and benchmarks used by similar bodies in comparable organizations. I also provided terms of reference for the governance and oversight review that is now under way. I sincerely hope that this review will identify a more rational division of labour and responsibilities among the various audit and oversight bodies, and that it will ensure they are fully equipped with the resources and capacity to carry out their very important role. With specific regard to the Office of Internal Oversight Services, in addition to looking at how to bolster its audit and investigatory capacity, which I believe is essential, I also hope the review will (a) explore the implications of the Office's new direct reporting line to the General Assembly for the Secretariat's ability to draw on its internal audit capacity as an input for management decisions; and (b) explicitly review the appropriateness of the Office retaining its management advisory functions.