GENEVA, Jan 11 (AFP) - The United Nations is to use an independent firm of auditors to help ensure that aid money promised for the Asian tsunami disaster relief effort finds its way to those in need, UN officials said Tuesday.
UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said he was also aiming to extend a more transparent and systematic form of financial tracking to the rest of the world body's humanitarian aid, partly to boost confidence among donors.
"We want to be held accountable as aid agencies working on the ground and we want also our friend the donors to be accountable for what they promise and what they are actually delivering," Egeland said.
"I hope that this can spur more pledges and more realisation of pledges," he told journalists.
The world body has accepted an offer by the US firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit the massive aid deliveries for the tsunami appeal, said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN humanitarian coordinating agency OCHA.
The offer follows scathing criticism of the way the UN ran its controversial Iraqi oil-for-food programme under the regime of former leader Saddam Hussein.
"The UN has accepted a free offer from the auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers to follow the aid for the tsunami victims," Byrs told AFP here.
"We are in the process of drawing up a proposed accord which will be signed shortly."
She said the agreement was part of UN efforts to ensure transparency in aid pledges. "Every dollar given will be audited so the public can be informed."
US development aid (USAID) chief Andrew Natsios indicated before the meeting that Washington felt the tsunami pledging had gone "backwards" with donations being promised before needs were assessed and planned.
"We need to make this need-driven rather than contribution. And that's the focus," Natsios said in Washington before the meeting .
Byrs said the United Nations would also beef up its own auditing service so that all donations meant for tsunami victims were properly accounted for.
Egeland emphasised that the current auditing process was a "good system", but the UN was unable to properly track the funding process from pledges to the actual response.
The oil-for-food programme, the UN's largest aid programme ever, was meant to allow Iraq, then under international sanctions, to sell just enough oil to ensure it could buy enough food and medicines for its population.
However, audits released Monday by a commission of inquiry appointed by UN chief Kofi Annan last year showed how contractors pocketed millions of dollars in excess charges as UN officials failed properly to oversee the programme.
The stakes are also high now with an unprecedented global aid operation in full swing to help countries ravaged by the December 26 tsunamis, which killed more than 157,000 people across Indian Ocean coastlines after being triggered by a powerful earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Billions of dollars have been pledged by governments and the general public for the relief effort.
01/11/2005 15:02 GMT - AFP