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74. It is in connection with the need for greater comparability between the agencies of the United Nations that the Conference adopted a resolution recommending that the necessary steps be taken to ensure that by 1950 the Budget of UNESCO follows the standard pattern of the United Nations for appropriations and accounting purposes, providing that it could still clearly show the cost of each programme activity separately. This recommendation brings yet one stage nearer that co-ordination which is indispensable for the United Nations, its Specialised Agencies and the international civil service which is coming into being to serve them.
74. It is inace ne policies of the many
4. FINANCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE ORGANISATION 75. Introduction.—Apart from the approval of a programme of work and the appropriation of funds matched to that programme, the Conference had to satisfy itself that the financial and administrative organisation was suited to the execution of the programme and the appropriate control of the funds. The decisions which the Conference took on these matters fall therefore into two groups, those which deal with the nature, expenditure and accounting of the money voted in the Budget, and those which deal with the recruitment, remuneration and organisation of the staff of the Secretariat.
76. The United Kingdom Delegation found the financial organisation satis- factory as a whole, but there were many matters of administrative organisa- tion, particularly of the organisation of the staff, which it examined critically and which it believes the Conference to some extent remedied. We have already said that the system of administration was, in our opinion, too rigid. It was based upon a too severe separation of responsibility between the programme staff and the administrative staff. The result was that a compli- cated, and, we believe, unnecessary burden of administrative procedures and checks was placed upon the organisation which absorbed an undue proportion of staff and funds and which subjected the programme staff to the disadvantages of a too rigid supervision and control. Reference has already been made to the important resolution which the United Kingdom Delega- tion succeeded in having adopted by which we hope that this particular situation will be largely overcome.
77. The following paragraphs comment briefly upon the main decisions which the Conference took, and provide a reasonable statement of the present financial and administrative organisation.
78. The Auditors' Report.-We were well aware that the Auditors' Report upon the accounts of the organisation for 1946 was unsatisfactory but that later reports covering the first part of 1947 showed a marked improvement. We therefore examined with particular care the two Reports submitted to the Conference, one in respect of the financial year 1947 as a whole and the other for the first six months of 1948.
79. The Reports themselves are lengthy documents and, as they will be published by UNESCO in the official proceedings of the Conference, we see no reason to include them in extenso in this Report. Nevertheless, we must make clear that the two Reports in question showed a satisfactory situation with regard to financial control and expenditure. In their Report for 1947, Messrs. Price and Waterhouse, the Auditors, state
"We have reviewed the accounting procedures and the system of internal control . . . we have made such exhaustive tests of the account- ing methods as we considered appropriate. In our opinion, based
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