United Nations: Observations on Reform Initiatives Page: 4 of 29
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Secretariat and the seeming inability to restrain costs. Demands were
made that U.N. member states adopt procedures to control the budget, and,
in 1986, the U.N. General Assembly adopted consensus budgeting-a
process for reaching broad agreement without calling for a vote. The
United States supported this measure as a step toward ensuring that
sufficient attention would be paid to the views of the major contributors in
the development of the budget. Member states demanded other initiatives
to increase financial discipline, such as the adoption of results-based
budgeting and sunset provisions on new U.N. programs. In the early
1990s,the United States and other member states identified the lack of
effective internal oversight at the United Nations as a major problem. They
cited concerns about administrative waste and inefficiency. The
Secretariat itself identified a crisis in the U.N.'s procurement system that
raised serious concerns about financial controls. The U.N. Office of
Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) was created in 1994 in response to
concerns such as these. At the same time, member states also demanded
systems that could evaluate and monitor the relevance and effectiveness of
U.N. programs so they could decide which programs to retain.
In 1994, the Secretary-General reported that the U.N.'s management of
human resources was in crisis. The organization was faced with new
challenges, and its human resources management had failed to adequately
respond. Among the concerns of the Secretariat were a performance
appraisal system that did not rate staff fairly or consistently, the lack of a
code of conduct that clearly laid out staff rights and consequences for
misconduct, and the inability to plan its human resource needs.
These problems and the demands for change by member states culminated
in reform initiatives announced in 1997 by the Secretary-General.
According to the Secretary-General, the United Nations had become
fragmented, rigid, and, in some areas, irrelevant. The United Nations had
also created duplicative bodies, rather than instituting effective
management structures. To build a cohesive organization that acted with a
unity of purpose and deployed its resources strategically, the
Secretary-General incorporated many of the earlier demands for reform
into his initiatives, as well as other initiatives to restructure the United
Nations.
Summary The Secretary General has said, and I agree, that reform is a process and
not an event. Based on our preliminary assessment, we believe that the
Secretary-General has undertaken a serious effort to reform the UnitedGAO/T-NSIAD-99-196
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United States. General Accounting Office. United Nations: Observations on Reform Initiatives, text, June 22, 1999; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc289524/m1/4/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.