The U.N. Stamp Scandal?

Sometimes, it is just too easy to take potshots at the U.N. Here is another example, courtesy of Fox News:



Auditors from the U.N.’s investigative arm, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), are currently putting the last touches on an investigative report that has taken months to complete, and that aims to determine exactly what happened — and why — to the U.N.’s rare and much-admired collection of materials that belong to the United Nations Postal Administration.



Basically, someone in the byzantine U.N. bureaucracy sold off the U.N.’s rare stamp collection at apparently bargain basement prices. How and why this happened is the subject of the investigative report, which may shed further light into the mismanagement problems at the U.N.



It is no doubt unfair to tar the whole organization with these kinds of management scandals. But neither should these things be dismissed as irrelevant, because if the U.N. can’t keep track of their multimillion stamp collection, or a multi-billion oil for food program, then there is reason to doubt their ability to handle other important tasks.