| An internal report sent to the World Bank's board of directors earlier this year was one of the first indications of a sea change. In it, the Bank's operations evaluation department (OED) used the word "corruption" for the first time ever, citing two projects the Sixth Highway Project in Haiti and the Natural Gas Technical Assistance Project in Nigeria. These projects, it explained in its April report, were "among many" which were "severely hampered by lack of transparency, spurious accounting practices, and non-compliance with Bank procurement rules". If that wasn't enough of a blow, a June memo from Bank president James Wolfensohn announced that henceforth there would be spot audits of countries' programmes apparently sending shock-waves throughout the institution. Wolfensohn had learned during his first year of office that thousands of projects and billions of dollars have slipped through the Bank's oversight procedures. Accordingly, he made the unprecedented decision to do surprise audits on projects in the Bank's major borrowing countries. First on the list are Poland, Kenya and Pakistan. "We want to put the fear of God in them," says Raghavan Srinivasan, the Bank's chief procurement adviser. |