I'm having trouble with this. Any help appreciated. Am I wearing my rose colored glasses again or is this reading they are looking for truth and integrity and trying to RESTORE it?? Or just another gimic to fool the poor into believing there is JUSTICE in this world after all?
World Bank Unit Close to Wolfowitz Cited for Reform
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 14, 2007; D01
An anti-corruption unit at the World Bank heavily promoted by ousted president Paul D. Wolfowitz needs to be overhauled to mend tense relations with the rest of the bank's staff, according to a report released yesterday by a high-level outside review panel.
The panel, headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, lauded the overall goal of the bank's Department of Institutional Integrity but said changes were required to end unnecessary conflicts with the bank's staff and reduce a "siege mentality" that undermined its effectiveness.
While the unit has achieved "some notable success," resistance to its mission has been "particularly strong" at the World Bank because of a feeling among the staff and even members of the executive board that a "strong anticorruption effort would somehow be antidevelopment and 'penalize the poor twice,' by curtailing lending in corruption-prone countries," the report said.
The report also said the World Bank had a culture that "favors seeking out lending opportunities" and a pay and performance evaluation system that favors making "loans for promising projects." Probes that might expose corruption were resented because they created "an awkward problem in relations with borrowing clients." As a result, the report said, "a lack of common purpose, distrust, and uncertainty has enveloped the anticorruption work of the Bank."
The panel recommended a series of institutional and managerial shifts to end the unit's isolation, including making the unit's director a vice president. "What is necessary is a fully coordinated approach across the entire World Bank group, ending past ambivalence about the importance of combating corruption," the report said.
Robert B. Zoellick, who replaced Wolfowitz as president this summer, embraced the report, telling reporters that it "makes clear the serious challenges ahead in overcoming the cancer of corruption in operations supported by the bank, and it offers constructive recommendations."
The department's director, Suzanne Rich Folsom, a lawyer with strong Republican ties, has been a lightning rod for criticism of the unit. Zoellick said, however, that he planned to name her vice president.
Folsom was counselor to Wolfowitz's predecessor, James D. Wolfensohn. Wolfowitz retained her as counselor and then named her director of the unit last year, ignoring the recommendations of an internal search committee, according to a report issued last week by the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group.
"She has done very good work, operating in extremely difficult circumstances," Zoellick said. "The Volcker report recognized that work."
The GAP report criticized her for holding dual roles as counselor to the president and heading the anti-corruption campaign, saying it posed a conflict of interest. It said Folsom was biased toward hiring Americans and accused her of "a pattern of abuse of authority."
The Volcker report agreed that the head of the unit should not also be counselor to the president "in the interest of clarifying the purpose and independence" of the unit. It also called for "more diversity in [the department's] staff, consistent with the need to recruit investigators of the highest technical competence." |
