Background on new Embassy Baghdad Office of Accountability

I just found these March, 2007 blog reports describing a short interview with Boots Poliquin, the new (March, 2007) head of the Embassy Baghdad Office of Accountability & Transparency. He seems to be talking about things I wrote in white papers in 2005 and early 2006, but the State Dept. wouldn't even have meetings on the subject. In mid-2007 I found out about him and wrote an email, but never got a response. He graduated law school about 2000, and is not an accountant or auditor.

Unfortunately, that means he will take a legal approach to issues, rather than a business or accounting control process approach.

And, these articles are all from a formal press conference held with Poliquin in March. The State Dept. would never let us (CPI) or other Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO) advisors talk to the press in 2004-2006 when I was there, thus we couldn't tell the press that we already were doing or knew all the things that Poliquin discussed in this press conference.

He is too young - he won't get the respect of any of the leaders in the Iraqi Inspector General's offices, or the Board of Supreme Audit, or CPI. And, since he isn't an accountant or auditor, and doesn't have relevant certifications in the field, the IG's and BSA leadership won't respect his opinions. (I have gray hair!)

vj

=============================================
From Reuters
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/PAR644015.htm

Ministerial veto, violence block Iraq graft fight
06 Mar 2007 14:06:47 GMT

By Claudia Parsons

BAGHDAD, March 6 (Reuters) - Lack of security for investigators and ministerial vetoes of investigations are hampering efforts to tackle graft in Iraq, one of the world's most corrupt countries, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.

Boots Poliquin, director of the newly formed U.S. Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT) in Baghdad, said he was working to set up a Joint Anti-Corruption Council to help Iraq's graft watchdogs work better together.

Poliquin told a news conference in Baghdad that the Iraqi ministry with the most allegations of corruption was the oil ministry, followed by the interior and defence ministries.

"Those are the top three where we see allegations," he said. "But remember, an allegation is simply that. It's an allegation until a case has fully gone through the system."

Bringing cases to prosecution, however, has proved difficult. Poliquin said that since the establishment of a Commission on Public Integrity in 2004, around 2,627 cases had been brought to it, of which 450 had moved forward to court.

"(That) has resulted in 80 arrests and from that six formal adjudications," Poliquin said.

Transparency International, an independent watchdog that monitors corruption around the world, placed Iraq second from bottom on its 2006 survey of 163 countries.

Critics say many Iraqi ministries are run as fiefdoms of the political party in charge with cronyism and corruption rampant, particularly in the oil sector. A U.N.-sponsored audit last year found hundreds of millions of dollars of oil revenue wrongly tallied or simply missing entirely in 2005.

SECURITY CHALLENGE

Amid sectarian violence that killed more than 34,000 civilians last year, according to U.N. figures, those who investigate corruption are obvious targets.

Poliquin said security was "one of the great challenges" facing anti-corruption bodies.

"The security issue does effect the ability to move cases forward," he said, adding that part of his budget would be allocated to providing safe offices for corruption investigators within the fortified international Green Zone in Baghdad.

Poliquin said his office had offered funding for armoured vehicles.

"I think as the security situation improves, or as we assist in getting a more secure environment for these individuals, more cases will be brought forward," he said. But violence was not the only obstacle to prosecuting cases.

"One of the more prevalent reasons we're seeing is that when a case moves along ... there is an article that the relevant minister can invoke to basically stop a case," he said.

"There are a number of ministers that have done that," he said, declining to say which ministers.

"That's part of the law," he said. "If you don't like it, the organisations need to work together to change the law."

Asked if that amounted to institutionalised corruption, Poliquin said: "It could be seen as that."

But, he added, it could also be argued the article was meant to avoid frivolous allegations from crippling official business.

==========================================
from NBC Around the World Blog at:
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/03/09/85910.aspx

Posted: Friday, March 09, 2007 9:44 AM
Filed Under: Baghdad, Iraq
By Bruno Silvestre, NBC News Producer

A few months ago, the watchdog group Transparency International published its yearly Corruption Perceptions Index. Out of 163 countries surveyed in 2006, only two, Myanmar and Haiti, were found to be more corrupt than Iraq.

This country was described as "one of the greatest corruption nightmares on the planet."

"That has to change" was the message delivered earlier this week by Boots Poliquin, the American director of the Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT) in Baghdad. "We want to try and develop [a] sense of accountability and transparency within the system of Iraq."

His agency has been up and running for 45 days and Poliquin said he was extremely satisfied with the response and the cooperation he’s received from the Iraqi authorities. However, the local culture, the ongoing cases against unscrupulous contractors, and Paragraph 136B of the Iraqi Criminal Procedure Code are likely to render his job almost impossible.

Different rules for elites
For years, corruption was taken for granted in Iraq. But like in many Middle Eastern countries, receiving or making a gift was not automatically associated with bribery.

Iraq is a tribal society where the elite -- maintaining decades-old practices -- support and promote their own. That was true under Saddam. It is still true today. Rules regulating conflicts of interest are non-existent. In other words, tackling "corruption" will require a complete change of mindset within the Iraqi society.

It was revealed after the war that Saddam diverted hundreds of millions from the U.N.-administered Oil-for-Food program. The corruption scandal stained the United Nations and was cited by the Bush administration supporters as evidence of the international body’s failings.

But that program’s successor -- the Development Fund for Iraq which was created after the fall of Baghdad -- is hardly a perfect example of transparency either.

In May 2006, a U.S. congressional report on work projects in Iraq revealed it was investigating 72 cases of alleged fraud and corruption. There have been numerous instances where contractors were caught overcharging the occupation authorities and out of the billions earmarked and spent on the rebuilding of Iraq, $8.8 billion remains unaccounted for.

Loop hole in criminal code
But the most serious handicap in dealing with corruption may be a small paragraph of the Iraqi Criminal Procedure Code, written in 1971 while Saddam was the driving force behind the powerful Baath Party, and still valid today.

Paragraph 136B stipulates: "The transfer of the accused for trial in an offense committed during performance of an official duty, or as a consequence of performance of this duty, is possible only with permission of the minister responsible."

What it means, explained Poliquin, is quite simple. "The ministers have the ability to say: I just don’t want this case to go forward, invoke article 136B and the case stops. And that option is being invoked more often than we would perhaps like to see it invoked."

Does 136B represent institutional corruption? Maybe not. But it is clear that before long Iraqis will have to do something about this paragraph if they are genuinely prepared to stand by Poliquin and give him a hand in clamping down on corruption.

Since the Commission on Public Integrity in Iraq was established in 2004, 2,627 cases of corruption have been brought forward. Of those cases, only 17 percent were moved to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, resulting in 80 arrests and 5 final adjudications. As long as this conviction rate remains so low, there is little chance Iraq will climb up the Transparency International list any time soon.

===========================================
from
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=03&year=2007&base_name=post_3025&6

LIVE FROM BAGHDAD. TAP senior correspondent Spencer Ackerman is currently embedded in Iraq and will be filing periodic reports for Tapped in the coming weeks. His first dispatch is below.

--The Editors

---

GANGSTER'S PARADISE. Welcome to the Green Zone, Tapped readers. I'm here for another hour and a half before I join the unit I'm supposed to embed with elsewhere in Baghdad, but I wanted to give you something of a corruption update.

Earlier today, a U.S. Embassy official named Boots Poliquin briefed reporters on his brand-new Office of Accountability and Transparency, an anti-corruption effort meant to "train, promote and develop" the Iraqi government's institutional bulwarks against the rampant cronyism and corruption that NGOs like Transparency International have identified. Poliquin told us that he's working with Iraq's multiple layers of watchdogs -- the ministerial inspectors-general, the Commission on Public Integrity and the Board of Supreme Audit -- to identify better practices for ensuring that public money gets spent the way it's intended.

Some of us -- well, I'll speak for myself -- had a hard time understanding exactly what the trouble is. It wasn't political will among the Iraqis, he assured us. Security was a problem, sure, but he added that the IGs especially needed to know how to "identify waste, fraud and abuse, and to develop standards" for determining corruption -- but such remedial instruction makes it sound like the IGs don't know how to be IGs. Then, almost as an afterthought, Poliquin said that a significant impediment to the successful adjudication of corruption investigations is that a law known as Article 136B allows the ministers under investigation to "essentially stop a case. That's the law." The biggest corruption targets? Just the crucial ministries of oil, defense and interior.

Whoa. In Iraq, the target of a corruption investigation can quash the investigation, "completely as the prerogative of the minister." I asked Poliquin if Article 136B amounts to institutional corruption. "It could be seen as you describe it," he replied. Or, another way of putting it, he said, was that "it's in place because it could stop otherwise frivolous allegations." He declined to say how the anti-corruption agencies his office works with see the law.

One indicator of how to view it: the law is a remnant of Iraq's Saddam-era criminal code. I asked another official if the Coalition Provisional Authority hadn't abolished that code. The official replied that it had, but his understanding is that ex-Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari resurrected the provision. Given that the Jaafari government wasn't exactly renowned for its cleanliness, it's unlikely frivolous accusations were such a pressing issue for the administration.

As long as Article 136B remains in place, Stuart Bowen, the U.S. special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction spending, is going to have no shortage of muck to rake. (Luckily, Congress last year basically forced Bowen out of business for his diligence, so don't expect the U.S. to lead the Iraqi government by example.) Bowen recently testified that Iraq is increasingly taking over reconstruction disbursement, so if you're a corrupt contractor, now is as good as ever to exploit U.S. taxpayers and Iraqi citizens.

--Spencer Ackerman

Posted by Spencer Ackerman on March 6, 2007 2:09 PM | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blog.prospect.org/mt-tb.cgi/13616

========================================
See also:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004045.php