The United Nations Gulf War reparations programme admitted on Friday that it had overpaid some $60 million to claimants for damages from Iraq's 1990-91 invasion and occupation of Kuwait.
The Governing Council of the UN Compensation Commission (UNCC) called on 70 governments to return within six months the excess money paid out for 22,000 duplicate claims. A senior UNCC official said that no intentional fraud was suspected after a two-year investigation into the overpayments which he said UN auditors had known about.
"The total estimate that we have made is around $60 million," Mojtaba Kazazi, secretary to the Governing Council, told a news briefing after a four-day meeting in Geneva. "The total amount of the overpayment represents approximately one-tenth of one percent of the total amount of compensation awarded by the Commission," he added.
The UNCC - the largest claims body ever - is winding up more than a decade of work after approving $52.5 billion in payments, of which some $21.4 billion has been paid out to date. The Geneva-based body was set up in 1991 by the UN Security Council to make payments to individuals, corporations and governments for losses resulting from former President Saddam Hussein's invasion and seven-month occupation of Kuwait.
A year ago, the Volcker commission investigating the UN's scandal-tainted oil-for-food programme for Iraq cleared it of using incorrect exchange rates after UN auditors' raised fears of $5 billion in overpayments.
The UNCC was not initially part of the investigation. But former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker widened the scope of the probe because of the auditors' concerns.
Most errors in the $60 million of excess payments sprung from computer technology used in the early 1990s to process 1.7 million individual claims, which failed to detect all duplicate claims, officials said.
Some individuals filed in more than one country. Some problems arose from multiple versions of Arab names transcribed into the Latin alphabet, which later proved to be duplicates.
The Governing Council also declared that funds still owed by the UNCC for corporate or government claims will be withheld from those governments where duplicate individual claims have been found. The Governing Body is composed of the same members as the Security Council, including the five veto-wielding powers (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States).
Separately, 16,500 claimants who are entitled to a total $50 million have not been located and the money now reverts to the UNCC as deadlines have passed, a statement said. The largest group were some 3,500 migrant workers from India, according to Kazazi.
The UNCC pays compensation claims with income that is derived from its share of Iraqi oil sales, currently five percent, which officials said averaged $150 million a month.
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