Just over a year since the UN Development Program’s Cash-for-Kim scandal broke in the headlines, the UN auditors promised by Ban Ki-Moon have yet to visit North Korea — but under the leadership of Senators Norm Coleman and Carl Levin, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, or PSI, has now come out with a staff report on “The United Nations Development Program: A Case Study of North Korea.” (Think of it as Oil-for-Food, the Sequel; and Next-UN-Scandal, the Prequel).

The PSI has not yet put up a live link to the report, so for now here’s a link to a copy posted on the UNDP web site (I’ll link to it on the PSI site at the earliest opportunity). The UNDP has also posted its response (they spin, you decide). And you can find good news and opinion summaries here, here, and here’s an Inner-City Press account of a few more things that could stand looking into.

The related hearing is Thursday morning at 10. More to come. But for the moment, in view of that disappearing Jay Lefkowitz speech on North Korea, described in the post below, and the findings of this PSI report on how North Korea battened onto the UNDP-related bank account as a handy means of obtaining a “more secure channel” for funneling money around the world without getting caught, can anyone explain how Condi Rice’s trusted envoy to the Six-Party Talks, Chris Hill, could read a report like this and still believe he can cut a viable deal with North Korea about nuclear bombs?

For that matter — since the U.S. provides the lion’s share of the money for the UN, and then has to spend all this time and effort to track down even a portion of the laundered, skimmed and scammed funds — can anyone explain why the UN, the UNDP, or the UN ETC, is necessary to the U.S. in the first place? Wouldn’t it be simpler to not pay the money, therefore not have to do the policing, and instead spend the time, effort and billions looking for ways, and appropriate allies, to genuinely deal with what matters to America?