A Tsunami of Waste: Dollars Squandered, Accountability Blown Off
Following up on this previous post as if on command, Drudge has linked to a story on the inefficiency inherent in what currently passes as international aid:
Overheads take up to 1/3 of tsunami funds
NEW YORK, Dec. 23 (UPI) — Up to about a third of the $590 million U.N. fund spent for the Indian Ocean tsunami relief may have gone to pay for overhead.
The Financial Times says its two-month investigation showed the money appears to have been spent on administration, staff and related costs. The $590 million was part of the United Nation’s $1.1 billion disaster flash appeal.
The newspaper also found several U.N. agencies continue to refuse to disclose details of their relief expenditure in spite of earlier pledges of transparency by senior officials.
Access to original The Financial Times stories on tsunami aid is only for subscribers, but the titles of the pieces involved are revealing enough:
- “Costs Eat Into Funds Raised throught Disaster Appeal”
- “Lack of co-ordination hits housing hardest”
- “Little clarity on how aid gets spent”
Paragraph 8 at The Better Business Bureau’s Give.org “Wise Giving Alliance Standards for Charity Accountability” page states that a charity should “Spend at least 65% of its total expenses on program activities.” Technically, the tsunami relief effort slides under this standard (if we are to believe that no more than one-third of funds are going to overhead). But because of scale, an enterprise of this size should be able to achieve its goals with a much lower level of fund-raising (FR) and administrative (ADM) costs. Examples of American charities that keep their costs much lowere including the following (scroll down to near the end of each report):
- American Red Cross — FR - 5%, ADM - 3%
- Salvation Army — FR - 5%, ADM - 12%
- Save the Children — FR - 6%, ADM - 4%
Until “senior officials” involved in tsunami relief release their financial records, we can only imagine where the money is disappearing to.
And by the way, do those “senior officials” reneging on their promises of financial transparency expect former presidents and ceremonial tsunami relief envoys Clinton and Bush to be silent on this? Perhaps that, and more: Mr. Clinton just wrote a “one year later” piece for the International Herald Tribune, where he oh-so-predictably concluded with a plea for even more of what isn’t working: “a Global Emergency Fund to provide humanitarian relief workers and affected governments with sufficient resources to begin life-saving work within 72 hours of any crisis.” Just what we need: another unaccountable UN slush fund, and more of what demonstrably did not work a year ago.
As Mark Steyn wrote back in January:
Yet, even though Mr. Egeland’s (UN) office has a permanent bureaucracy dedicated solely to humanitarian relief work, a week after the disaster it didn’t seem to have actually done anything other than fly in some experts to assess the situation. Reporters on the ground have noted the lack of activity in Colombo and Sumatra. But the U.S. government already had ships and troops and water and medicine on the way.
Moving to the longer-term relief effort — Perhaps if the private charities had been allowed to do their job without the intervention of UN-sponsored “help” during the past year, Mr. Clinton would not need to be writing a column about all the work that still needs to be done.
The two ex-presidents should be publicly demanding the transparency that was originally pledged, and threaten to resign from their mostly ceremonial posts if it isn’t forthcoming.
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UPDATE: Riding Sun (HT Instapundit) read The Financial Times print edition, and notes: “The FT says that charities and relief organizations usually spend no more than 10% of donations on overhead. The U.N. tripled that.”
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