Washington, April 10: Afghanistan’s lead audit body lacks the independence needed to track billions of dollars in public and foreign funds while President Hamid Karzai’s office actively meddles, a U.S. report said on Friday.
The Obama administration sees pervasive corruption as a big threat to stabilizing Afghanistan and insists that Karzai should tackle graft in his second term.
But the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction was very critical in its own audit of the country’s Control and Audit Office (CAO), the main oversight body whose goal is to prevent misuse of public funds.
“It is inept, inadequate and not independent,” Jay Rollins, who led the U.S. audit of the CAO, told Reuters.
His team found the CAO lacked budgetary and operational independence and was “subject to executive interference.”
“Afghanistan’s Auditor General stated that the CAO has been unwilling to take on audits that could be politically insensitive or may be turned down by the Office of the President,” said the U.S. report released on Friday.
“Sometimes it is active interference and as a result the CAO’s reports often go unimplemented and unenforced,” Rollins said.
The CAO’s independence and efficiency is important for Washington and its allies which pledged at a conference in January to give half of their development aid directly to the Afghan government within the next two years.
“We have to do a lot more to build the capacity of this organization if we want to put additional funding through the Afghan government,” said Rollins.
Currently about 20 percent of U.S. assistance goes directly to the Afghan government, said Rollins. The United States has pumped more than $40 billion into rebuilding Afghanistan since 2001. About half went on security, including training and equipping the Afghan army and police force.
LEGAL FRAMEWORK
Corruption is seen as systemic and entrenched in Afghanistan. The watchdog group Transparency International ranked it 179th out of 180 on its corruption index last year.
A key problem for the Control and Audit Office was its current legal framework, which Rollins recommended should be updated to provide greater independence and authority.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said in a written reply to the audit it would raise this with the Afghan government before the end of this month.
“That could make an immediate impact in terms of what is audited and how it is audited and who gets the reports and what they do with the findings and recommendations,” said Rollins.
Another problem was that the CAO was not required to release its audit reports to parliament or to the public. They were sent directly to the president.
The finance ministry funds the CAO, giving quarterly rather than annual payments, making it hard to plan ahead for audits.
While demanding greater transparency of Afghanistan’s government, the United States has only provided the CAO with $112,472 in aid from November 2007 to January this year.
“It is very incongruent that the U.S. has not provided more support for this office,” said Rollins.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul said it would work with other donors to implement a “capacity development plan” for the CAO by the end of June.
The World Bank has led so far in helping the CAO, providing two thirds of its total budget and paying up $13.3 million since 2004, the U.S. report said.
But the World Bank focused primarily on having its own funds audited rather than building up local capacity.
The U.S. review found sufficient staff with 313 positions filled, but most employees were poorly trained in computer skills and English and relied heavily on support from foreign consultants and advisors.
“The Afghans were allowed to watch and help gather information but they were not involved in planning the audits or writing up the reports,” Rollins said.
–Reuters