Foreign Assistance

Intended as emergency food relief for countries such as Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, thousands of tons of U.S. commodities donated to the World Food Program of the United Nations have been lost, stolen, or mishandled due to lax accountability and internal controls. The program is exempt from accountability requirements that the Agency for International Development (AID) places on other program sponsors, and AID did not follow its own regulations governing its relationship with the program. GAO also notes that the United States does not always respond quickly to the World Food Program's emergency food requests. During fiscal year 1992, U.S. donations generally arrived nearly 8 months after being requested. The slow response occurred because AID does not routinely treat World Food Program emergency requests as emergencies and because the Agriculture Department uses the same procurement and shipping procedures for emergency and nonemergency orders. Despite the slow U.S. response, emergency victims have not suffered because the program is able to substitute food stocks from other sources until U.S. donations arrive.

GAO found that: (1) WFP has lost thousands of tons of U.S. donations through theft and mishandling because of its inadequate accountability procedures and AID inattention to its accountability and internal control problems; (2) AID has exempted WFP from accountability requirements because it is a United Nations agency, and failed to follow AID regulations governing its relationship with WFP; (3) AID believes WFP has adequate management and accountability procedures to safeguard U.S. donations; (4) WFP has delegated its responsibility to manage commodity donations to host governments and nongovernmental organizations without imposing adequate accountability requirements on them; (5) AID cannot detect WFP procedural weaknesses and commodity losses because it is unfamiliar with WFP monitoring practices and WFP donor reports are incomplete and inaccurate; (6) WFP has not fully implemented many of its auditors' recommendations to improve its accountability, monitoring, and reporting procedures; (7) the United States is often not responsive to WFP emergency food requests because AID does not have a system to expedite WFP emergency requests and the Department of Agriculture uses the same procurement and shipping procedures for emergency and nonemergency orders; and (8) WFP recipients have not suffered from the United States' slow response to emergency food requests because WFP has been able to substitute food stocks from other sources until U.S. supplies arrive.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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