GAO denied access to oil-for-food audits

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Dozens of internal United Nations audits of the troubled oil-for-food program in Iraq were routinely shown only to the U.N. official now at the center of an international scandal over kickbacks from the regime of Saddam Hussein, a congressional investigator said yesterday.

Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the General Accounting Office, told a House hearing that U.N. auditors had refused to release the internal audits to GAO investigators probing the scandal that poured an estimated $10.1 billion from secret oil sales and inflated contracts into Saddam's coffers under the U.N. program.

"We sure asked for them," Mr. Christoff testified to the House International Relations Committee, only to be told by the U.N.'s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) that the 55 audits dating from the program's birth in July 1996 through June 30, 2003, were "internal documents."

Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, said he was considering legislation that would tie the U.S. contribution to the U.N.'s budget -- 22 percent of the international body's total funding -- to cooperation in the oil-for-food probe.

Several Republican lawmakers said the world body's management of the program called into question its competence to help in the political reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq.

"If we're going to ask the United Nations to be a participant in bringing about stability in Iraq and helping us set up a government that is going to work over there, then, by golly, we have to be able to trust them," said Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican.

Meeting with reporters in New York, normally low-key U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan lashed out at what he called "outrageous and exaggerated" press reporting on the scandal, saying the United Nations was being blamed for things -- including vast Iraqi oil smuggling operations -- that were widely known at the time and over which U.N. officials had no direct control.

"If you read the reports, it looks as if the Saddam regime had nothing to do with it," Mr. Annan said. "It was all the U.N."

While his office did not have day-to-day oversight of the oil-for-food program, "all this is being dumped on the Secretariat," Mr. Annan complained. "These allegations are doing damage."

Several House Democrats complained at yesterday's hearing that Mr. Annan and the United Nations were being made scapegoats in order to undermine their influence in Iraq and elsewhere.