UN Pension Blog received today an “open letter” dated 9
April 2016 from Sugiyama Iutaka, UN retiree and former Chief of Entitlements of the UN Pension Fund, which states, inter alia (full letter and attachments are available below):
The Pension Fund’s ‘Update’ meant to address the unprecedented processing delays is “seriously flawed, deceptive, . . . not professionally prepared. . . incomplete . . . selective [and] silent on [the] critical issue [of the extent of the backlog]." The Fund seems to have discontinued the procedure of “providing Executive Officers with the monthly report of pending cases, including an aging of each case. . . [yet] the CEO now turns the blame for the delays on the employing organizations."
For the last decade, instead of “investing in training, [the Fund] destroyed institutional memory [and now] Crisis Task Force teams . . . costing over $250,000. . . . [include] senior management doing clerical work and neglecting what they have been hired to do. . . [O]versight has not been exercised, both by the Pension Board and by the OIOS [Office of Internal Oversight Services]. . . . It seems that the audit of Human Resources and IPAS received many red flags in the audit of 2013 which were removed by senior OIOS personnel in order to give the Pension Fund a satisfactory performance. . . Q-Gates [performance benchmarks] established by the United Nations [DM] on the I-Seek cannot be verified because the management of the Fund is not being transparent, introducing facts that are not relevant to the delays, and omitting cases from the backlog list.
The cover note to the letter states that the letter has also been sent to the Fund CEO, Pension Fund Staff Representatives, the Chairs of the Pension Board and the UN Staff Pension Committee (requesting both Chairs to distribute to the Board and Committee members), other Participant Representatives, the Secretaries of the UN Agencies’ Staff Pension Committees, and the AFICS leadership.
The Pension Fund’s ‘Update’ meant to address the unprecedented processing delays is “seriously flawed, deceptive, . . . not professionally prepared. . . incomplete . . . selective [and] silent on [the] critical issue [of the extent of the backlog]." The Fund seems to have discontinued the procedure of “providing Executive Officers with the monthly report of pending cases, including an aging of each case. . . [yet] the CEO now turns the blame for the delays on the employing organizations."
For the last decade, instead of “investing in training, [the Fund] destroyed institutional memory [and now] Crisis Task Force teams . . . costing over $250,000. . . . [include] senior management doing clerical work and neglecting what they have been hired to do. . . [O]versight has not been exercised, both by the Pension Board and by the OIOS [Office of Internal Oversight Services]. . . . It seems that the audit of Human Resources and IPAS received many red flags in the audit of 2013 which were removed by senior OIOS personnel in order to give the Pension Fund a satisfactory performance. . . Q-Gates [performance benchmarks] established by the United Nations [DM] on the I-Seek cannot be verified because the management of the Fund is not being transparent, introducing facts that are not relevant to the delays, and omitting cases from the backlog list.
Recommendations:
a. The UNJSPF ought to fill its established posts with appropriate and competent personnel instead of assigning [an] unsustainable Task Force.
b. The United Nations Administration needs to establish an ad hoc tripartite
investigation team, independent of the Pension Board and OIOS to find out what is the real backlog and how deep is the mismanagement of our Pension Fund.”
The cover note to the letter states that the letter has also been sent to the Fund CEO, Pension Fund Staff Representatives, the Chairs of the Pension Board and the UN Staff Pension Committee (requesting both Chairs to distribute to the Board and Committee members), other Participant Representatives, the Secretaries of the UN Agencies’ Staff Pension Committees, and the AFICS leadership.
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