A United Nations investigation into alleged graft within its refugee program in Uganda has unearthed corruption amounting to millions of dollars.
A report by the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) pointed to inflated bills, fraud and non-compliance with rules among other malfeasance that caused losses for the U.N. refugee agency.
The East African country hosts more than 1 million refugees, mainly from troubled South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries.
Uganda has in the past received wide praise for its open-entry refugee policy that grants aliens free movement within the country, access to public health services and land for settlement and farming.
The OIOS’s audit covered UNHCR’s operations in Uganda for 18 months from July 2016.
“We have acknowledged serious shortcomings and have already started taking action … (The) majority of the actions resulting from these reviews have been implemented even before the final audit report was released,” Reuters quotes Babar Baloch, UNHCR spokesman.
The audit revealed excessive fuel use by UNHCR vehicles assigned to officials from Uganda’s office of the prime minister (OPM), which manages refugees and provides contract services to UNHCR.
These include refugee registration, though UNHCR has taken over the role since allegations by whistleblowers of inflated numbers.
The audit said OPM paid $283,000 in allowances annually to dozens of its staff but “was unable to provide to OIOS documentation to substantiate that these civil servants were working on UNHCR projects.”
Uganda is yet to respond to the revelations.
The report said OPM paid too much for land ostensibly to expand space for refugee registration activities and there were also potentially $7.7 million in overpayments for water supplies.
Some procurements were done without competitive bidding while others carried insufficient documentation, exposing UNHCR to losses through inflated prices and other fraud.
