ROME – As many as 20 percent of posts at the Food and Agriculture Organization financed by donors in advance are “permanently vacant” due to recruitment delays, meaning the UN agency is overpaid many dozens of millions of dollars in member state contributions each biennium, according to a damning review by the UN Inspection Unit.

 The Inspection Unit’s “Review of the management and administration in the FAO,” has been posted on the FAO Website but unusually without FAO posting any management views on it. The FAO director general Qu Dongyu made strenuous efforts to push back preparation of the shicking report until after he was elected, unopposed, to a second term. “The report is alarming devastating and causing a stir among diplomats accredited to FAO,” one seasoned FAO watcher told Italian Insider.

 “Despite understatements and a neutral, measured tone, the report with 10 formal recommendations and 34 ‘informal recommendations,’ inflicts a devastating blow on DG Qu’s management,” the observer opined.

 The report recommends enhancement of all oversight functions of FAO including ethics, ombudsman, inspector general and evaluation. Qu tried to curb any critical power in those offices, for instance by keeping the ethics officer and ombudsman on short term contracts. The FAO audit function has been unable to uncover the shortcomings highlighted in the report and “no doubt it will be reinforced in future,” said the observer.

 The report is highly critical of the budgetary documents prepared by FAO management. They are described as too succinct, considered to be inaccurate and not providing precise information by unit on objectives, expenditures, performance, achievements and posts. The report recommends an overhaul of the budget if not the whole budgetary process.

 The most dramatic aspect of the report’s conclusions regards the 20 percent average vacancy rate of employment posts due to recruitment delays. After removing secretarial posts where vacancies are filled immediately the vacancy rate in the professional category is as high as 30 percent. This means that member  states and taxpayers are paying some 20 percent more than they should do since 20 percent of posts are vacant, FAO sources said.

 This raises a critical budgetary issue as vacancy rates for budget purposes are considered formally to be only between 1 percent and 1.24 percent. The overpayment is considered to be “in the region of many dozen millions of U.S. dollars per biennium,” one observer said.

 Some diplomats go so far as to consider the degree of budgetary misrepresentation to amount to a form of budgetary fraud, he added. In many cases it takes several years to fill professional posts.

 The report calls for an overhaul of the FAO organizational chart. Qu brought into FAO a Chinese type management culture in which he relies on a very limited number of members of the so-called Core Leadership, a group of some five officials, mainly three Deputy Director Generals. “The DDGs, often without suitable qualifications and background for the functions they supervise, are expected to supervise a large number of departments and divisions and are unable to do so,” one FAO insider said.

 The report notes (in paragraph 55) that the “FAO organizaitional chart is not depicted as a traditional organizational chart in which the structure and reporting lines are clearly represented. There is no clear indication of the areas and scope of responsibilities, both direct and indirect, of the Core Leadership as determined by dual reporting lines.”

 The observer commented that “it is not known if the Core Leadership is responsible for anything or if it navigates in an unreal stratospheric vacuum of perfection. FAO is a freewheel, sprawling bureaucracy.”

 Diplomats believe the report may have strongly influenced by FAO regional offices that have sought more delegation of authority to free themselves of control from headquarters.

 “The Mission visited the FAO Regional Office for Europe based in Budapest which is under strong influence of Russia and no doubt requests for greater autonomy were suggested by Pavel Chernikov, a Russian national on the team,” the source said. “The regional office for Africa, based in Accra, Ghana, always has complained about the weight of headquarters in its day-to-day business.”

 It is unclear how FAO members and diplomats will review and decide on implementing the constellation of over 40 recommendations in the report, which could herald years of painstaking discussions in the FAO governing bodies.

 Few observers expect Qu Dongyu to implement any meaningful changes even if his managerial competence is called into question by the report. 

 jf