Foreign Assistance: Controls Over U.S. Funds Provided for the Benefit of the Palestinian Authority.
Abstract
Your June 6, 1995, letter requested that we analyze a series of letters that allegedly were prepared by the Palestinian Authority's Finance Minister and the Director General of the Palestine Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (FECDAR). These letters indicate that $138 million from an unidentified source(s) was "diverted" in late 1994 to finance a number of covert transactions, such as purchasing land and building apartments in Jerusalem, funding a Palestinian journal, and providing financial support to groups inside Israel sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. To address your general concern that U.S. assistance funds may have been involved in one or more of these transactions, we ascertained (1) what financial controls were set up by the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to monitor the use of U.S. funds provided to Palestinian Authority, PECDAR, or Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials for budget support purposes and (2) what controls USMD established over project funds provided to other U.S. government agencies, private contractors, nongovernmental organizations (NGO), private voluntary organizations (PVO), and the United Nations for the benefit of the Palestinian Authority. We did not examine whether the letters are authentic since you asked the Central Inteffigence Agency to make that determination. We did not have the authority to review whether the funds spent by other donor nations for Palestinian Authority police salaries and project assistance were at risk. Other nation funding accounted for approximately three quarters of the estimated $389 million in total donor disbursements in 1994. Our report focuses on the estimated $51 million the United States disbursed in 1994: $10 million to the World Bank's Hoist Fund,' $5 million to help pay for Palestinian Authority police salaries, and $36 million for specific development projects.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1996
- Accession Number
- ADA344883
Entities
Organizations
- United States Government Accountability Office