Up to $41B in World Bank climate finance unaccounted for, Oxfam finds
oxfam.org
oxfam.org
That said, it's high-time for organizations like the World Bank to have fully transparent finances. Like, I should be able to go to a website and see where every single dollar is being spent. I say this as someone who's a citizen of a country who contributes heavily to the org And therefore, I think I have a right to know where my money's going.
It links to a report which seems to be the main publication, but frankly is very light on details of their audit. Also a lot of the claims are very strangely phrased which makes it difficult to figure out if the criticisms are legitimate or overblown.
Audits have degrees of certainty; an opinion may be unqualified, meaning the records are spotless, qualified, meaning there are issues but the records are trustworthy, and adversarial, meaning the records are inaccurate and do not represent the actual financial status.
If the records are questionable, it will usually take much more investigation than a standard audit to track down every money unit and produce a clean accounting of the money. Hence, it is possible to identify that records are wrong, but knowing exactly whether the money is still present but unaccounted for versus the money is actually gone from the organizations control without a record of the transaction isn't yet determined.
The DOD itself hasn't passed an audit ever. Money comes and goes without accounting meeting financial standards. That does not strictly mean that the money has been embezzled, only that the DOD and World Bank are unable to demonstrate that it hasn't been.
Can you think of a better place to embezzle? Its risk-free without any accounting standards. 100% that embezzling is taking place and at a large scale.
I’ve heard the budget battles between the Navy and Air Force can get particularly severe.
Because you can't convict someone for embezzlement if you can't prove it. And you can't prove it if there are no records. This is the purpose of proper financial record-keeping standards - to know where the money is and where it came from and where it goes.
I'm not sure what that could be, but a general answer would be that neither faction wants too much scrutiny. They would therefore have mutual self-interest in maintaining a system where they can keep crappy records (or none) while still keeping mountains of money.
What isn't clear is this: if say the Sheriff buys 100 riot shields from Company X, does his cousin own Company X and there is a kickback or a favor? I couldn't answer those questions because they would require a whole new level of investigation.
If there's an outflow from Company X back to Brother back to Sheriff then there's some clear kickbacks!
1. The cash doesn't have to be withdrawn all at once, it can happen over the course of months 2. The cash can come from earlier cash transactions, not withdrawal 3. Payment can be indirect: CEO donates to a non-profit that hires sheriffs family 4. Instead of kickback the CEO can repay the sheriff with another favor at future time
I hope we're not planning to outlaw cash and implement total invigilation of every transaction just to make corruption slightly more inconvenient.
Coincidentally, the Liberal Democrat Party in Japan just lost their majority (and subsequently very likely the government) today due to widespread embezzlement and tax evasion.
Always argue for absolute transparency of public monies, there is no justifiable reason public monies have to be kept secret.
The audit likely uncovered conflicting information and records. The range represents the high and low bounds of possible interpretations of that conflicting information.
Pesky conscience and personal ethics
The amount of grey area advice I received from my ex-CPA taught me that there is ample opportunity there. This is also why she's my ex-CPA.
> A few days later, Musk tweeted: "If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it."
Last I heard he owed $11B to the US Gov in taxes in 2021, I hope it was put to good use.
Oxfam attempted to add up all the numbers in various PDFs linked on the World Bank's website and got a total that's less than the headline figure in the World Bank's press releases. (See the actual report at https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...)
Some of that is probably missing data and some of it reflects that headlines like "USA donates 1 billion" don't actually always result in the US making a bank transfer for a billion dollars. For example sometimes it's a simplification of a complicated loan.
Your comment reflects a common misconception about audits. When the books don't add up that doesn't show that money is actually missing.
I don't love analogies to personal finance but a better one would be to suppose you asked a random US citizen what they spent money on last month and then compared it to their bank account. They'd probably be wrong, and you probably wouldn't have enough information to know exactly how wrong they were because they didn't save all their receipts and so on.
*edit: this report provides no evidence money is missing. to be fair it doesn't disprove missing money either
This analogy explains well but it's missing the important bit: private citizens don't have any requirement to save receipts. Charities and businesses do have that requirement.
Heck, if you give money to someone and they commit fraud and abscond with your money, you get to take a tax write-off for the stolen funds.
At least for US federal taxes, that changed with a very partisan ~2017 law, where Republicans stripped it down to only cover federally declared unique disaster situations.
E.g. for financial fraud crimes, you much more than likely would still be able to take the loss.
Of course, a lack of financial controls makes it easier for people to actually commit fraud, but the Oxfam report didn't go to that next level and look for specific evidence of fraud.
You mean like a certain crypto exchange CEO that recently went to jail for it?
He and his team were physically threatened and had to have bodyguards (actually, it was cops, but they acted as bodyguards). In the early 2000s he decided to call it quit, after 8 years. He told us that the weirdest fraud of all was money laundering, as it was at the same time the easiest and the hardest to prove, depending on who did it.
All that to say actually finding fraud is hard, proving it is even harder, and can be dangerous even for lower orgs, so i won't criticize Oxfam for letting it rest where it is.
If hundreds of billions of dollars in aide over 2 decades isn't fixing these nations, what will?
There's a lot of change happening now in Kenya, especially in terms of stable and democratic governance, but in no way is it not corrupt. It ranks at near the top consistently amongst African nations for corruption and bribery at all levels of the government.
Both of these organisations certainly have their issues with corruption, fraud, and grift, but that would likely be the case no matter where they are based. If anything, being physically closer to where much of the money is being spent should help them keep a closer eye on the work that they're funding.
Most people would probably agree that the reduction in those basic financial pressures to reform is more than offset by the more formal governance requirements which are (sometimes) attached to the granting of multilateral loans (and the types of governance the private sector cares about don't necessarily always align with what the World Bank cares about). But it's not automatic, especially given "improving governance" isn't the main reason the multilaterals make loans in the first place.
One of the functions is each student presenting their country and their interests.
Always got the sense the program is to train public officials on proper methods of government.
A well-regarded development organization I used to work for went through a quiet reorganization in 2016 when a few million dollars came up missing. It turned out that just getting materials to rural places in Sub-Saharan Africa was really, really hard to do without graft along the way.
I don't know how things ultimately resolved, but it's not obvious to me that effective countermeasures would have been cheaper than letting some of the money leak out in the delivery chain. It's an inherently hard problem to disburse development aid to the right parties in the right amounts.
It's weird that with the sort of numbers that could lift some countries out of poverty, we can't even write something down in a spreadsheet.
So how many dollars et al. do you want you want to spend documenting how you spent your dollars?
Presumably < 100% and > 0%?
But what's the right number? If we spend $1 in accounting for every $1 spent on mission, and that produces a perfect audit trail, is that too much or little?
This is not how you end poverty. This is how you pad the pockets of whatever entity is best positioned to receive that amount. It will promptly be flown with those people to the Dubai gold market where an all-gold suit will be purchased and the rest of the country never sees a dime.
Ultimately self sufficiency needs to be obtained in a stable and scalable way and then the proceeds can distribute across the economy better.
"Graft" shouldn't need to be an unknown monetary amount missing from a bank account, especially for something like transporting things:
* Can they wear hidden cameras/microphones to get the amounts documented?
* Are they using local transport companies and staff or are they valiantly parading their bright white Hiluxes and Range Rovers as UN type orgs are prone to do, which attracts an undue amount of attention?
At some point the transport cost becomes a fixed cost of whatever that can at least be reported back to donors. Nobody donating to this type of cause expects transport to be a small number.
The US spent ~$6 trillion in one year, 2023 [0] on ~330 million people. Billions live in the Global South and are in much greater need of resources, due to lack of accumulated capital investments.
Huh? I'm pretty sure the Global South produces significantly more carbon emissions than the Global North. Like double. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong?)
From a quick Jupyter CSV excursion:
Region
North 13307.26
South 24518.75
Name: Emissions, dtype: float64
(edit: updated, miscategorized Australia)
Besides, the debt is something accumulated over time. Even if the emissions of India are large today they were much lower 40 years ago, while European emissions were probably larger at that time.
So isn't the North already paying the South for this pollution?
Where? I don't know if your comment had the actual lists of countries in the global north and south previously but it doesn't have it now.
In any case, your analysis is incomplete. It's missing per-capita emissions and cumulative historical emissions.
Of course my "analysis" is incomplete, I wasn't trying to do a complete analysis, just get an idea for where all the carbon emissions come from. Apparently ~2/3 comes from the Global South (currently). Forecasting models don't have normative parameters.
- "As published on: africa.cgtn.com, Friday 18 October, 2024."
I can confirm the OP text is indeed identical to the text on that CGTN article (Chinese state-owned media). This is simple plagiarism—among other things.
edit: On that tangent, CGTN Africa itself plagiarized Oxfam's press release—it's obviously the same text, run through an LLM for rephrasing. It's SEO spam all the way down!
Site certificiate expired October 25, two days ago.
Site is not authoritative/original link:
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/41-billion-world-ban...
The report itself:
> Download Oxfam’s new report “Climate Finance Unchecked.”
> https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
The certificate is expired, your traffic to and from that site is not encrypted. If it were the case that your traffic could still be encrypted, what would even be the point of expiring the certificate?
You're correct that you can still access it, over an unencrypted connection, however.
If that's the case, then Google's condescension is doing a disservice to its users.
<bold>Your connection is not private</bold> Attackers might be trying to steal your information from expired.badssl.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more about this warning net::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID
Just throw in a big red exclamation point on top of the little padlock icon next to the URL bar - it's literally only there to inform the user about any potential security issues. Use it and (unless the site is known to be or obviously malicious) load the bloody page.
Honestly, it's absolutely insane that the browser misrepresent out of chain HTTPS as more of a threat than HTTP.
Seems fine.
yup. I'm sure the one dude responsible for it will get to it on Monday.
Intelligent people here are quick to jump on a 2-dimensional puppet headline to provoke the predictable canned outrage.
Yes, outrage is certainly appropriate .. daily oil profits? wasteful and unrelenting energy practices across civilization?
Outrage posturing is the name of the game. Say a lot. Sound serious. Threaten action. Do nothing.
Not sure where you're seeing that in the article, it doesn't use that language at all. It actually directly contradicts what you're saying in the first sentence:
"Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is unaccounted for due to poor record-keeping practices"