Canadian Carman Lapointe is walking into the world’s toughest auditing job: cleaning up the sprawling United Nations after massive fraud scandals and allegations that her new boss, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, obstructed her predecessor’s watchdog efforts.
Ms. Lapointe has clashed with tough bosses like past World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz and former Canada Post president André Ouellet when she was their auditing chief.
Now, she is walking into a lion’s den, insisting she only took the job after being promised independence by Ban Ki-Moon, but that she’ll need to fix broken relations with UN management if she’s to clean up its tarnished reputation.
Her predecessor as Under-Secretary-General for Internal Oversight, Swede Inga Britt-Ahlenius, came in five years ago after the UN’s oil-for-food fraud scandal, but left penning a scathing report accusing Mr. Ban of leading the UN into decline, undermining her office’s independence, and blocking her reports from being made public or passed on to outside prosecutors.
“Clearly there are a lot of issues to be dealt with,” Ms. Lapointe said. “The Secretary-General has assured me that I will have his full cooperation, and that I will have no worries about the need to have operational independence -- I will have that. I think my biggest challenge is actually going to be in repairing the relationship between management and the oversight function.”
“My predecessor points out some very valid issues in her end-of-assignment report [but] the tone of it, and the fact that it’s been played out in the public, is unfortunate. Because what it does is it screams again, like everyone believes, that management and oversight cannot collaborate in the interests of the organization.”
Now, as she moves from Rome, where she’s auditing chief for the International Fund for Agricultural Development, she will be closer to her three adult children in Ottawa and Vancouver, but will have her work cut out to build trust within the UN, and its credibility as an institution.
Born in Virdon, Manitoba, and raised mostly in Brandon, she built her career in Ottawa as an internal auditor for institutions like the National Capital Commission, the Bank of Canada, and Canada Post.
Her 27 years in the Canadian public service seem to have ingrained in her that the place to confront power is usually behind closed doors. Her style, she says, is to work with management to make progress even when she tells them what they don’t want to hear -- it’s worked in most cases, but she’s had confrontations when they don’t want to listen.
She quit as Canada Post’s auditor in February, 2004, just before Mr. Ouellet, a former Liberal cabinet minister, was suspended with pay over the sponsorship scandal -- and six months before he was fired over audits revealing improper expense claims and hiring practices. She won’t detail what happened, but said, “I did take an early retirement at a huge penalty to move on.”
“At some point you have to decide if your values are consistent with the values of the organization. And if you determine that they’re not, and you try and try and try to influence a change in that regard, and it doesn’t work, you have to decide if it’s worth killing yourself over,” Ms. Lapointe said. “It was very tough.”
She moved to become the World Bank’s internal auditing chief, and there clashed with Mr. Wolfowitz, the hard-nosed deputy secretary of defence under George W. Bush.
And though her office had no part in the scandal that cost Mr. Wolfowitz his job -- an anonymous complaint launched a scandal over the Bank paying his girlfriend’s salary to work at the U.S. State Department -- Ms. Lapointe clashed with her boss several times, but outlasted him. On one occasion, Mr. Wolfowitz argued her audits exceeded her mandate, and in several clashes, she survived with the backing of the audit committee of the bank’s board.
“There were several times when I had to ask for a special meeting of the audit committee, to say I’m about to hit the send button on something that is very likely to cause me to get fired,” she said.
Whether she can expect that kind of support at the UN is another question, however. Its sprawling bureaucracy is famous for in-fighting, and the appointment of a Canadian upset some by breaking an unwritten rule that said the next auditor would come form a developing nation.
The question now is whether the UN will back a strong watchdog to clean up its tarnished reputation. “We’re expected to keep the organization honest, and if we do that job well, it helps the organization convince the stakeholders of its credibility,” Ms. Lapointe said.
