9.1 Overseeing donor funds: Inspector General systems

Government agencies, especially in the United States, have long used inspectors and auditors to monitor and verify the delivery of development and humanitarian assistance schemes. The activities of the USAID Office of the Inspector General (OIG), for example, resulted in discovery of a collusion and kickbacks scheme between vendors and implementers of USAID-funded humanitarian aid programmes in Syria; as a result, 6 implementing companies were debarred.

The high costs of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and the expenditure of billions of dollars on reconstruction in both countries, prompted the creation of standing Inspector General offices for US overseas deployments. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) were the first two instances in which inspector general offices were dedicated to particular missions, overseeing the expenditure of all mission funds, from development to military.

The US Congress has now institutionalised the IG system for overseas operations, requiring a Lead Inspector General for every operation lasting longer than 60 days. The mandate of the Lead IG includes ‘oversight of contracts, operations, governance, humanitarian and development assistance, and intelligence’; the Lead IG personnel deploy in the field to monitor operations. The role is performed by personnel drawn from IG offices at the State Department, the Defense Department, and USAID. Its effectiveness, however, has not yet been tested; it is also unclear whether drawing on regular IG units will be more effective than an external oversight team with a specific mandate and few close relationships in the departments whose work it oversees.