SIGIR offered three major recommendations that would strengthen oversight in Ukraine: establish an independent agency that would organize and monitor contingency operations streamline and unify contracting procedures of agencies involved in reconstruction and establish provincial reconstruction teams for effective and timely delivery of services.įoremost among SIGIR’s recommendations was an independent stabilization and reconstruction operations office. aid from various agencies was fragmented and chaotic, contributing to corrupt practices and other major inefficiencies. The “lessons learned” report of the special inspector general for reconstruction of Iraq (SIGIR) concluded that U.S. These lessons are readily transferrable to Ukraine. involvement in Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s postwar reconstruction. Valuable lessons on execution can be drawn from U.S. Congress must legislatively set up, as part of the currently debated bill, an independently integrated management office for administering the reconstruction effort to be housed within the State Department. In order to manage corruption in this fourth tier, and as part of its newest appropriations bill, the U.S. It is the bottom-up operational level of management and oversight that interacts in-country and on-site with regional and local officials and private sector contractors to provide hands-on technical advice, administration, supervision, and quality control for thousands of construction projects. This is “bottom-up” corruption, which involves humanitarian aid and construction-related fraud, waste, and abuse. What is missing from the discussions is an essential fourth tier for managing corruption during the recovery and reconstruction phases. This represents the top-down level of programmatic oversight: scrutinizing the allocation and disbursement of institutional funds, developing policies, and managing programs. These include inspectors general, for existing funding of military operations and humanitarian assistance, as well as by multilateral donor agencies and EU agencies. Several layers of aid inspection are already in place in the United States, comprising the third tier of oversight. By reining in the oligarchs and state-owned enterprises, Ukraine’s own efforts comprise the first tier of corruption control.Īn equally important second tier is creating an international, multilateral coordination and oversight framework that would manage and reduce the anticipated corruption that large sums of funding, from multiple sources, engender. Clearly, Ukraine has a major role to play in curbing corruption. Special attention must be paid to curbing the foreseeable corruption by the country’s oligarchs and properly managing the involvement of 3,300 state-owned enterprises in Ukraine’s anticipated fast-paced recovery. No nation is immune from corruption, and Ukraine is no exception. Congress is currently structuring its fifth supplemental appropriations bill for Ukraine.Ĭentral to a successful reconstruction effort will be curbing corruption. At the latest G-7 meeting in Japan, leaders reaffirmed their commitment to ensuring that Ukraine has the economic support it needs for recovery and reconstruction, a project that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called “not a project of one nation, but a joint task of the entire democratic world.” And the U.S. Though it may seem premature to discuss Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction, with a Ukrainian counteroffensive launched two weeks ago making some small gains in the south of the country, in fact, the moment to do so is now.
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