Afghanistan's lead audit body lacks the independence needed to track billions of dollars in public and foreign funds while President Hamid Karzai's office actively meddles, a US report said on Friday. The Obama administration sees pervasive corruption as a big threat to stabilising Afghanistan and insists that Karzai should tackle graft in his second term.
But the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction was very critical in its own audit of the country's Control and Audit Office (CAO), the main oversight body whose goal is to prevent misuse of public funds. "It is inept, inadequate and not independent," Jay Rollins, who led the US audit of the CAO, told Reuters. His team found the CAO lacked budgetary and operational independence and was "subject to executive interference."
"Afghanistan's Auditor General stated that the CAO has been unwilling to take on audits that could be politically insensitive or may be turned down by the Office of the President," said the US report released on Friday. "Sometimes it is active interference and as a result the CAO's reports often go unimplemented and unenforced," Rollins said.
The CAO's independence and efficiency is important for Washington and its allies which pledged at a conference in January to give half of their development aid directly to the Afghan government within the next two years. "We have to do a lot more to build the capacity of this organisation if we want to put additional funding through the Afghan government," said Rollins.