By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, June 19 -- The UN has purportedly tried to root out corruption from its Enterprise Resource Planning project UMOJA, including by firing its chief Paul van Essche after Inner City Press showed he had falsified the resumes of insiders he wanted to hire. Click here for that.
But other whistleblower have since told Inner City Press in detail that PriceWaterhouseCoopers delayed through waste the project. PCW was given its first UMOJA contract at time it had been out of the consulting business for five years -- it was not qualified.
Then PCW was kept in the money by a series of "not to exceed" $6 million contrasts, each time rolled over and extended so that it did not have to be put out to bid.
Soon UMOJA was two years behind schedule. An investigation of it was quashed by the new (and still current) chief of the Office of Internal Oversight Services. See leaked memo here, exclusively published by Inner City Press.
New players were brought in, many of them associated with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's chief of staff Susana Malcorra, either through WFP or further back through the telecommunications company in Argentina where they worked.
But still it is behind schedule. The bally-hooed project in Lebanon, featured on TV screens in the UN lobby, is only a small pilot project, insiders say, involving a mere 60 out of 320 processes.
UMOJA is a fiasco -- but in its headquarters on Wednesday the UN was focused, for more than an hour, on trying to order Inner City Press, which digs into and writes about UMOJA, to stop dissenting. Well, no. Watch this site.
