The question — and answers from some top officials who do protest too much, methinks — arises out of a discussion about one of the most successful cleanup acts Turtle Bay has ever put together. Known as the Procurement Task Force, this oversight unit recently almost became a victim of its own success.
The task force emerged victorious, with its budget intact for another year and a plan to make it a permanent overseer of white-collar misdeeds at Turtle Bay. But some U.N. officials and member states consider the task force a waste of money that makes the organization look bad and sanctions the harassment of its officials.
One of the task force's targets, Sanjaya Bahel, is scheduled to be sentenced today at a federal court downtown after he was convicted on fraud and corruption in June 2007. The former procurement officer's trial exposed how incredibly easy it was for mid- and high-level bureaucrats to barter U.N. contracts for personal luxuries like a plush Manhattan apartment — and do so with impunity.
So much impunity, in fact, that the internal U.N. watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, initially cleared Bahel of the allegations against him. Such botched OIOS investigations led a former management chief, Christopher Burnham, in May 2005 to set up a separate team of can-do investigators headed by an American, Robert Appleton, tasked with probing allegations of widespread corruption within the procurement department.
