The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC)

On Sunday the Wall Street Journal posted an article about Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes demanding an audit the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC).

The article states:

Four years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake toppled the capital city of Port-au-Prince and heavily damaged other parts of the country, hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated to the IHRC, are gone. Hundreds of millions more to the IHRC from international donors have also been spent. Left behind is a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.

Haitians are angry, frustrated and increasingly suspicious of the motives of the IHRC and of its top official, Mr. Clinton. Americans might feel the same way if they knew more about this colossal failure. One former Haitian official puts it this way: “I really cannot understand how you could raise so much money, put a former U.S. president in charge, and get this outcome.”

We could have warned them. While Bill Clinton was running the IHRC, he was reporting to his wife, Hillary, who was Secretary of State at the time. The article goes on to say that the IHRC as staffed by Bill Clinton excluded Haitian board members in the staffing and consultant selection.

The article further reports:

A June 2013 Government Accountability Office report gave a barely passing grade to USAID’s Haiti reconstruction effort. It said $170 million was allocated to build a power plant and a port near the Caracol Industrial Park, not far from Cap-Haïtien. The two projects “are interdependent; each must be completed and remain viable for the other to succeed,” the GAO explained. The first phase of the power plant was completed on time and under budget. But the port construction was delayed by two years “due in part to a lack of USAID expertise in port planning in Haiti.” Projected costs, according to the report, say the estimated shortfall of $117 million to $189 million is larger than originally estimated. “It is unclear whether the Haitian government will be able to find a private sector company willing to finance the remainder of the project.”

This is not a surprise when you consider how the Clintons ran the White House, but did we have to export their corruption overseas?