That’s the title of this Chicago Tribune jaw dropper about the United Nations Development Program – an agency largely funded by US tax dollars – and how the North Koreans ripped them off to the tune of $150 million while the clueless bureaucrats did nothing:

The United Nations Development Programme office in Pyongyang, North Korea, sits in a Soviet-style compound. Like clockwork, a North Korean official wearing a standard-issue dark windbreaker and slacks would come to the door each business day.

He would take a manila envelope stuffed with cash—a healthy portion of the UN’s disbursements for aid projects in the country—and leave without ever providing receipts.

According to sources at the UN, this went on for years, resulting in the transfer of up to $150 million in hard foreign currency to the Kim Jong Il government at a time when the United States was trying to keep North Korea from receiving hard currency as part of its sanctions against the Kim regime.

“At the end, we were being used completely as an ATM machine for the regime,” said one UN official with extensive knowledge of the program. “We were completely a cash cow, the only cash cow in town. The money was going to the regime whenever they wanted it.”

Kim uses hard currency to stay in power by disbursing the funds to reward loyal subordinates who in turn can then purchase capitalist goodies from South Korea and Japan. This is due to the fact that the North Korean won has about as much value in international markets as a wad of used toilet paper.

Riding to the rescue of the totalitarian regime however, are the UN flunkies who run the UNDP:

Documents obtained by the Tribune indicate that as early as last May, top UNDP officials at headquarters in New York were informed in writing of significant problems relating to the agency’s use of hard foreign currency in North Korea, and that such use violated UN regulations that local expenses be paid in local currency. No action was taken for months.

Then, under pressure from the United States, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon on Jan. 19 ordered an audit of all UN operations in North Korea to be completed within 90 days, or by mid-April.

The Board of Auditors, the UN body tasked with the audit, made no movement on the audit for 40 days after Ban’s order. It sent out its notification letter for the beginning of the audit on the same day the development program announced the closure of its office—March 1.

Bad enough that they stupidly enable one of the most totalitarian regimes on the planet with a nutcase for a leader who likes to dabble in nuclear diplomacy, they have to go and try and cover up their negligence by pulling one of the oldest bureaucratic tricks in the book; the “What? Who? Me?” defense:

That timing, combined with past concerns about the UNDP’s transparency, has raised suspicions that suspending operations would be a way to hamstring the audit, the results of which may prove damning to the organization.

“The office was closed precisely for that reason,” said another UN official with extensive knowledge of the program. “With no operations in place, first of all, you have no claim to get auditors into the country. Second, it will take months and months to get documentation out of the office there, to transfer to somewhere else like New York.”

The UN sources who spoke about the development operations in North Korea requested anonymity either for fear of retribution or because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the subject.

No North Korean office, no evidence. No evidence, no audit. Beeutiful.

And what does it say about that fine, upstanding “best hope for mankind” organization that the leaker fears “retribution” for telling the truth?

The way this swindle worked could have been serialized and made into a weekly sit-com – if it wasn’t for the fact that the regime being propped up is one of the most destructive of human rights on the planet:

UN officials privately describe a vivid scene playing out at the agency’s compound each day.

A driver in a UN-issued Toyota Corolla would pull out of the compound’s gate, taking UN checks to the bank. A short time later the driver, a North Korean employed by UNDP, would return with manila envelopes stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars in hard currency.

Then the windbreaker-clad North Korean official would show up and take the cash away.

UNDP spokesman David Morrison said the use of hard currency and the hiring of staff through local governments was standard practice in authoritarian countries like North Korea. Morrison said his understanding was that the agency had never had problems with site visits, and that in 2005 its staff had visited 10 of its 11 monitorable projects.

I wonder if the visits were as informative as when they checked up on a program that purchased computers for a North Korean university?

One of the UNDP projects, sources said, involved the purchase of 300 computers for Kim Il Sung University. The computers supposedly arrived in Pyongyang, but the international staff was not allowed to see the equipment it had donated.

Finally, after a month and a half of pressuring their North Korean handlers, staffers were led to a room in which two computers sat. They were told the others were packed in boxes, which they were not allowed to open.

And while the UNDP’s programs—which have included projects such as “Human Resource Upgrading to Support Air Traffic Services” and “Strengthening of the Institute for Garment Technology”—cost anywhere from $3 million to$8 million a year total, the development program also acted as the administrative officer for all the UN agencies and wrote checks for tens of millions of dollars worth of programming every year.

The UNDP’s financial officer and its treasurer in Pyongyang, who issued those checks, were both North Korean.

This is the kind of nonsense that John Bolton was fighting against. So of course, he had to go. He was being mean and nasty to people whose towering incompetence is matched only by the depth of their apathy. It isn’t a “culture of corruption” as much as it’s a seriocomic nightmare of small men, small minds, and a Byzantine bureaucracy that allows ineptitude to become the norm and inefficiency to rule the roost. The loss of $150 million in tax dollars doesn’t anger me half as much as the attitude of UN officials who don’t care enough about the integrity of the organization to reform it. They revel in chaos. They thrive in an atmosphere of unaccountability. And for that, they should all be thrown into the East River and given a good dunking.

Perhaps then they’ll get serious about making the United Nations less of a bad joke and more of serious forum for dealing with serious problems.