Trade and Development Board, 62nd executive session: Briefing on management issues

Statement by Mr. Joakim Reiter, Deputy Secretary General

Trade and Development Board, 62nd executive session: Briefing on management issues

Geneva
26 January 2016

​AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY
 
Mr. President,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
 
I have the honor to address you once again to continue our open dialogue on management issues in the UNCTAD secretariat. On this occasion, I would like to respond to a request made by several delegations to provide a comprehensive overview of the status of implementation of recommendations from oversight bodies.
 
As I have noted in previous briefings, and as outlined in the document Management Facts at UNCTAD, the UNCTAD secretariat is under the authority of three oversight bodies: the Board of Auditors (BoA), the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) and the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS).
 
The work, scope and approach of these three bodies are very different. Let me give you a quick overview of them.
 
The main role of the Board of Auditors is to issue a qualified opinion as external auditors on the financial statements of international organizations. The Board is composed of supreme audit entities of three member States on a rotational basis. UNCTAD is part of the UN Secretariat, and as such, its financial statement is also part of the financial statement of the UN Secretariat. The Board of Auditors would review our accounts and undertake their due diligence, but they, normally, would not issue recommendations directly to us. This has been the case for at least three biennia.
 
JIU in turn is the main external oversight body of the UN System and it has a broad mandate. JIU is composed of 12 inspectors, appointed by the General Assembly, who are independent in their functions. The list JIU participating organizations is mainly defined by the membership of the Chief Executives Board, or CEB. Therefore, the participation of UNCTAD in JIU is rare as compared to other Departments of the UN Secretariat.
 
The JIU undertakes around 12 reviews per year, out of which 11 normally cover topics, rather than entities. Some recent examples are management of vendor contracts in UN agencies, public information policies and practices, or the on-going review of system-wide activities in support of Small Island Developing States.
 
The number of recommendations issued by JIU in a given year varies depending on the topic, but regularly  between 70-80% of JIU recommendations would not be relevant to UNCTAD. This is the case, for instance, of vendor contract management, facilities management or security services where UNCTAD is serviced by UNOG.
In other occasions, JIU recommendations are not relevant because they cover issues governed at the level of the whole UN Secretariat, not at the UNCTAD level.
 
Of the 20-30% of JIU recommendations relevant to UNCTAD and received since 2007, we have implemented  76% of them.. And today, we only have 20 outstanding OIOS recommendations that have accepted and are pending implementation. Let me give you some examples to give you an idea of the topics covered:

  •  Re-examining what links can/should be made to the decent-work agenda;
  •  Enhancing the quality, integrity, visibility and added value of the evaluation function;
  •  Organizing dialogues with donors on common reporting requirements;
  •  With other relevant agencies, strengthening information sharing on support to the African Union and NEPAD;
  •  Having policies that specify requirements and standards related to weblayout and design, review of web content and web accessibility;
  •  Assessing the strategic importance of liaison offices and defining priorities for them;


For further information, we have made available in the room a list of all outstanding JIU and OIOS recommendations. At the end of 2015, we took stock of the status of implementation of JIU recommendations. This is an annual exercise whereby all JIU participating organizations are asked to contribute for JIU's annual report to the General Assembly. At this point, I realized that although we have a high implementation rate, we have some JIU recommendations that have been outstanding for some time, some for several years. I have therefore given instructions to incorporate all these outstanding recommendations onto our workplans.

Implementation is to be completed, wherever possible, as a matter of priority by end of 2016.

Before I continue, I would like to bring your attention to an issue raised before bilaterally: the need to prioritize any new projects of the Secretariat over the next few months.

We need to ensure that we have the capacity to prepare a ministerial conference in 6 months rather than the usual 12 to 18 months. This does not mean that we would stop all non UNCTAD14-related work. It does mean that we will need to make some choices, including which JIU and OIOS recommendations are implemented right away.

Turning to OIOS, contrary to BoA and JIU, this oversight body covers only entities of the UN Secretariat or other entities that make arrangement to use its services, such as the High Commissioner for Refugees -UNHCR. To ensure independence, the choice of USG for OIOS is done with General Assembly approval, similar to the SG of UNCTAD. OIOS undertakes its work along three main lines: audit, evaluation and investigation.

Investigations are triggered only when there are alleged violations of rules and regulations or some form of abuse, breach, or similar. On this we have fortunately nothing to report.

Evaluation is the youngest of OIOS' areas of work and the least resourced. This means that UNCTAD is covered by external OIOS-led evaluations only every 5 to 6 years. I should mention here that this cycle is not related to the ongoing evaluation work that is led by UNCTAD's Evaluation and Monitoring Unit, which includes several evaluations per year, some of them with your direct participation.

Audits are more common, whereby the normal OIOS yearly work plan would include two UNCTAD audits, covering either a topic or an organizational area. OIOS assigns a level of criticality to its audit recommendations, whereby recommendations are escalated from the usual "important" to "critical" when there are important risks of safeguarding of assets, security, viability, or similar. Since this rating system was introduced in 2011, UNCTAD has not received any critical recommendations for seven audits performed, and on at least two occasions audits did not yield any recommendations, but merely an outcome of "satisfactory".

Overall, UNCTAD has been making important strides in the implementation of OIOS recommendations, with yearly implementation rates consistently over the minimum 80% required. This is partly due to the fact that, contrary to JIU recommendations, OIOS recommendations need to be pinned down to a particular target date. Moreover, OIOS recommendations are, with very few exceptions, based on reviews of UNCTAD specifically and not of several agencies. Therefore, the relevance to UNCTAD's context is a given and the practical means of implementation are thus more easily identifiable.

In 2010, UNCTAD had some 35 outstanding OIOS recommendations. As of mid2015 this number had come down to just five. Up to the end of 2015, we added some 10 new recommendations and several others were implemented, taking us to a current total of 12 outstanding OIOS recommendations.

As a whole, we have committed to implementing 9 out of the 12 outstanding recommendations by the end of 2016. Five of these 12 recommendations stem from the OIOS evaluation of UNCTAD's research and analysis work.

They cover specifically:

  1. a new typology for research and analysis outputs;
  2. the reinvigoration of the Publications Committee;
  3. a dissemination strategy;
  4. furthering gender mainstreaming; and
  5. focused attention and resources to monitoring and evaluation.


The remaining recommendation from the OIOS evaluation is to adopt a quality assurance framework, which will be implemented partially this year (for research and analysis only) and partially next year (for statistical products).

The other four recommendations targeted for 2016 include:

  1.  ensuring that our work of evaluation adheres to UN Evaluation Group standards;
  2. adopting guidelines for revision of plans after biennial conferences;
  3. reviewing the reporting arrangements for the Chief of the Special Unit on Commodities;
  4. adopting SOPs within the Special Unit on Commodities for the planning of publications.


In 2015 we reached an implementation rate for OIOS recommendations of 100% and we intend to maintain this standard in 2016, by implementing the 9 recommendations I just mentioned.

From the perspective of senior management, the key issue is not the number of recommendations, but the recurrence of issues identified by JIU and OIOS and our priority areas. This includes RBM, strategic planning, evaluation, dissemination and so we are able to ensure a comprehensive approach rather than dealing with recommendations on a piece-meal basis.

Going forward, I have taken note of your interest in the issue of implementation of recommendations from oversight bodies. I will therefore aim to address this issue wherever possible in my future briefings on management issues. I take this opportunity to inform you that given the interest you have expressed, I intend to continue with these briefings every six weeks, starting from today. We will inform you of the specific date for the next briefing, which will probably be on 18 March.

Thank you for your attention, I would like to stop here to allow time for any questions you may have and to allow the Executive Session to continue.

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