OIOS report on investigation of DESA's Executive Office and TCMS reveals major corruption

Following an investigative story on Washington Times on December 13, 2006 from Betsy Pisik, after almost two years of intensive investigations, today OIOS presented to the 63rd session of General Assembly it's report on Activities of the Office of Internal Oversight Services for the period from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2008 (A/63/302 (PART I)).

In this report OIOS reveals how DESA's Executive Office (Catherine Peluso) and DESA's Technical Cooperation Management Services (Marie Oveissi and Furio De Tomassi) abused their power and rewarded contracts to individuals (consultants) without any criteria and/or proper bidding process.

The report shows that in the case of Peluso that she awarded out of 30 sample contracts - 10 contract to the same individual. While in the case of Oveissi and De Tomassi out of 37 sample of contracts, 34 of them were missing and destroyed.

We the DESA staff demand from Mr. Sha Zukang and our management to take immediate action and remove from DESA the above mentioned staff who, with their irresponsible actions, have brought shame and destroyed our reputation.

Here is a part of the OIOS report to General Assembly (ART.35 Page 16)

35. In an audit of the use of consultants and individual contractors by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (AN2007/540/02), OIOS found that the procedure for ensuring competitive selection was not spelled out by the Office of Human Resources Management of the Department of Management with a view to ensuring compliance by departments/offices. In addition, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs had not established internal procedures to ensure uniformly that the selection of consultants was competitive, fully documented, economical and in the best interests of the United Nations. Consequently, contracts were being awarded repeatedly to a limited number of consultants without documentation of a competitive process. For example, OIOS found that, of a sample of 37 contracts administered by the Technical Cooperation Management Services, documentation justifying the selection of candidates was not available in 34 files. In the contracts processed by the Executive Office of the Department, while 27 of 30 contracts sampled did document the names of the candidates who were considered, the same names were repeated in 10 of the contracts. The OIOS recommendations contained in the report are in the process of being implemented.