Reports Fault U.N. Watchdog Unit

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UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations' internal investigation division has been plagued by leadership that demoralized its investigators and stymied the group's ability to function effectively as an anti-corruption watchdog, according to two confidential U.N. reviews.

The management culture in the investigations division has been so dysfunctional, the author of one of the reviews wrote last summer, that the division should be shut down and replaced.

"A command and control, fear-inducing, top-down management style served as the basis for day-to-day operations" in the investigations division, Erling Grimstad, a former Norwegian prosecutor, wrote in a confidential June 2007 review commissioned by the head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, of which the investigations division is a part.

"There was an almost obsessive focus on confidentiality and a lack of transparency . . . which gave people outside . . . the impression that it was being directed as an intelligence service" that instilled a "culture of fear and insecurity," Grimstad's report said.

His report and another by Michel Girodo, a Canadian management consultant, which were obtained by The Washington Post, were critical of the U.N.'s former top investigator, Barbara Dixon, an American lawyer who ran the unit from 1995 to 2006, and the agency's Vienna-based deputy director, Mark Gough of Australia. As Gough resigned last month, he told his staff in an e-mail that he disagreed with planned changes, according to a U.N. official.

Dixon responded that the reports are riddled with inaccuracies that raise questions about their "credibility." Karl Paschke, a German national who hired Dixon in 1995 to lead the division, said he had the "highest regard" for her performance. "That does not sound as if they are talking about the Barbara Dixon that I know," he said.

The Office of Internal Oversight Services was created in 1994 to investigate corruption, fraud and other violations of U.N. rules. It includes an audit unit and an investigations division, which came under criticism in the reports for failing to uncover corruption.

In 2004, the division exonerated a U.N. procurement official, Sanjay Bahel, who was under suspicion of steering tens of millions of dollars in contracts to an Indian state company, according to U.N. documents. But a procurement task force, established in 2006, reinvestigated him, leading to his conviction this year for bribery.

The findings of Grimstad and Girodo were first reported Monday by the BBC. The reports highlight the failure of the investigations division to hold U.N. peacekeepers accountable, Human Rights Watch said Friday in a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, adding that U.N. investigators "ignored, minimized or shelved" allegations that Indian and Pakistani peacekeepers illegally traded gold, arms and rations with local militias.

The two reports "confirmed my own concerns and conclusions: namely that the professional investigators were under very poor leadership in a flawed structure," Inga-Britt Ahlenius, undersecretary general for the internal oversight office, said in an interview with The Post. "The secretiveness and confidentiality of everything really serves us extremely poorly."

Girodo's report described a "paramilitary management" culture that discouraged initiative among field investigators and centralized authority in the hands of a few senior officials.

"Investigators were not allowed to develop cases on their own, as all major case decisions were made by the Former Director," Grimstad wrote in a 147-page report. "As a result, if the Former Director was not in the office, work processes often came to a halt."