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Joseph Connor: Press Briefing on the UN Financial Crisis (1 July 1996) Press Briefing on the UN Financial Situation
By Joseph Connor
Under Secretary General for Management
July 1, 1996Joseph E. Connor, Under-Secretary-General for Administration and Management, at a Headquarters press briefing this afternoon, said if the communiqué reviewing United Nations reform in the economic and social fields issued by the "Group of Seven" summit in Lyon, France, over the weekend was a report card, it gave the Secretary-General an "A minus".
According to the communiqué, the reform process was "only just beginning, but concrete results are already visible", Mr. Connor said. Interestingly, it had begun with achievements -- the reform of the Economic and Social Council and its agenda; the review of the Committee for Programme and Coordination (CPC), the Committee for Development Planning; the discontinuation of the World Food Council; and joint meetings by the Administrative Committee on Coordination and the CPC.
Mr. Connor said he was particularly happy with the communiqué because he had not been sure the Group of Seven leaders even knew about the United Nations Efficiency Board and the 400 efficiency issues it had identified. The Board was one of the main reasons the mandated $154 million reduction in the United Nations budget had been achieved. Although his office had only announced plans for $140 million in reductions, it already knew where the remaining $14 million was coming from and was preparing a final report for the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ).
In their communiqué, the leaders had recognized the establishment of the Office of Internal Oversight Services and the increase in its capacity and broadening of its scope -- clearly, another plus on the Secretary-General's record, Mr. Connor said. They also recognized that United Nations institutions had achieved budgets with zero growth in nominal terms -- meaning that all inflation and exchange had been absorbed. The budget had been capped at $2.608 billion for the first time, and $250 million in real cuts had been made to hold to that zero nominal growth.
Mr. Connor said some press reports had been inaccurate, adding, "Yes, we did have 10,000 employees at the beginning of this year, but we have already achieved a downsizing to 9,000, not two years hence. It's done." One thousand posts had become vacant, or termination agreements had been signed which, when fully operational in the next couple of months, would make the posts vacant. "And we intend to hold them vacant", he said. Staff numbers had been reduced from 12,000 in 1985 -- a 25 per cent reduction. "More will come because we understand, and the Secretary-General's focus is on maintaining zero nominal growth in the future", he added.
The communiqué addressed the issue of humanitarian relief. Better coordination among the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Department of Humanitarian Affairs had already been accomplished, Mr. Connor said. Last year, at this time, no activity had been more heavily, persistently and vociferously criticized than that of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), he continued. The words used now to describe the agency were "downsized and refocused". The communiqué noted that the intergovernmental machinery had been scaled down, complementarity had been established with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and working conditions had been improved. The communiqué also talked about the regional economic commissions, he said. The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) had a 10 per cent to 20 per cent cut in posts; the Commission for Human Rights had gone through a similar exercise which would be considered by the ACABQ. In fact, all commissions were examining how to refocus and downsize, Mr. Connor added. The communiqué focused on the ninth session of UNCTAD as having established a good working relationship with Member States and the WTO, he said. It welcomed the strengthening and coordinating role of the Economic and Social Council. Mr. Connor said the communiqué suggests the three departments responsible for development and assistance -- the Department for Development Support and Management Services, the Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development and the Department for Economic and Social Information and Policy Analysis -- be merged and their programmes integrated under one Under-Secretary-General. A similar suggestion had been part of the idea on "clustering" advanced by the Secretary-General to the high-level group on strengthening the Organization. In the last few years, 20 departments had been reduced to 12. So, the suggestion of the Group to reduce three departments to one was very compatible with the Secretary-General's intention to have five or six departments. His "clustering concept" had clearly caught on. The Secretary-General would table his full reform programme at the beginning of the next session of the General Assembly, Mr. Connor added.
He said the communiqué's proposal to consolidate the United Nations field premises was already under way and not just for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and UNICEF, but also for the United Nations information centres.
Another proposal to reinvest savings in the development programme was already being addressed, Mr. Connor said. The Secretary-General's goal was to maintain zero nominal growth in the budget, and his office was examining ways to absorb $120 million in new mandates added by the General Assembly. One of the 400 efficiency issues was to "manage the mandates" -- to identify ways to postpone, curtail or delay existing activities and create freed-up resources for a number of activities, including development. The budget outline due in a month would deal with that issue. Each of the recommendations and suggestions made by the Group of Seven were already being addressed.
Mr. Connor said he could not help but smile when he read that the Group agreed that there was a problem with finances and that the crisis was impeding the Organization's work. The need to make up the arrears was not only necessary but imperative, he added. The summit had "good ideas which fit in well with the Secretary-General's own proposals". Asked for information concerning the high-level United Nations official in Geneva who had been accused of stealing $1 million, Mr. Connor said the official had been hospitalized, the matter was now in the hands of the police, and immunities had been waived. The case was being handled for what it was -- a fraud perpetrated on the Organization, he added. The correspondent said in the United States when someone was charged with criminal conduct, it became public knowledge. The United Nations had a record of not revealing names. Could you provide the name? the correspondent asked. Mr. Connor replied that he was sorry, but he could not recall the name although he had heard it. However, the case would be given full exposure under the Swiss legal system. Asked whether the hospital was a drug rehabilitation clinic, Mr. Connor said he did not know if it could be described that way, but it was a hospital for specialized care which he thought was located in either Geneva or France.
A correspondent asked whether Mr. Connor's description of United Nations reform efforts were in defence of the Secretary-General or the Organization. Mr. Connor said one of his jobs was to promote a more efficient Organization. He considered the word "reform" as pejorative. The Secretary-General had conceptualized the Efficiency Board, and his job was to implement it. That had produced a long series of specific ways to re-engineer process, and to refocus the Organization so the same output could be achieved with a different approach to the work flow. "Too often, what people conceive of as management consists of making it harder for people to get the work done", he added. The Efficiency Board had done exactly the opposite. It had identified redundancies in the process and in personnel, had reduced the time it took to hire people from eight to three months, and taken other action which all contributed to $154 million in budgetary reductions. Staff could not have been reduced to 9,000 without something substantive going on to achieve a more slimmed down, refocused and simplified Organization. "The Secretary-General has been the instigator and I have been the implementer, and that process would broaden", Mr. Connor said. The Secretary-General had said several months ago that by the next budget submission in March, he would have achieved a simplified organizational structure through "clustering". He wanted the Member States to simply the intergovernmental organizations as a necessary condition to reorganizing the secretariat. Those two must be taken together. The first of three phases of reform -- managerial reform, which was under the Secretary-General's control -- was significantly under way. Benefits were being achieved and more would be documented. The Secretary-General started organizational reform -- which meant fewer departments and fewer high-level posts -- when he first came to the United Nations, Mr. Connor continued. Wave two would hit at the end of the year. Similar mandates given by different intergovernmental groups to different parts of the Organization at different times created confusion and redundancy. The Secretary-General had to work with several high-level groups to straighten out the intergovernmental reform that the United Nations badly needed. The Secretary-General was not responsible for everything in the Organization. He was encouraging Member States to deal with redundancy in areas where he had very little say. Did either the Secretary-General or you raise the issue of alternative sources of funding at the summit, and was there any discussion on how to deal with the problem of non-payment? a correspondent asked. Mr. Connor said, to his knowledge, the issue of alternative forms of payment had not been raised. He welcomed the phraseology in the communiqué about making up arrears, on revisions of the scale of assessments and about a mechanism to keep Member States current. Action on the issues would resume in the next Assembly session. The United Nations financial crisis continued, and cash from the regular budget was now down to $35 million even after Germany and Japan had paid their regular assessments. The United States had paid only $10 million which was owed from earlier years.
Could the communiqué be translated into support for the Secretary- General's bid for a second term? a correspondent asked. Mr. Connor said that the correspondent would have to ask someone else that question. The communiqué had been "extremely complimentary" on what had been accomplished so far and a challenge to move forward. Some ideas which might seem new were basically focusing on areas which the Secretary-General had already identified, where he had a responsibility to proceed and had already announced his intention of doing so.
Was there an effort to renegotiate the ways in which the contributions of Member States were assessed and to revise the Charter to reform the Security Council? a correspondent asked. The idea of the high-level group on the strengthening of the Organization was to bring it up to date. The idea behind the high-level group on the financial situation was to overcome the problems of arrears, pay off the troop contributors and prevent, by new mechanisms, countries from falling behind in their payments and examine the basic fairness of the scale of assessments. The Secretary-General had laid out the problem for Member States in October 1994. There had been no lack of proposals from him. He was waiting for a reaction, and, clearly, time was running out.
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