Forbes | This article appears in the July 16 issue of Forbes magazine as a sidebar to “World Bank Mired in Dysfunction.”
The World Bank is a place where whistle-blowers are shunned, persecuted and booted–not always in that order.
Consider John Kim, a top staffer in the bank’s IT department, who in
2007 leaked damaging documents to me after he determined that there were
no internal institutional avenues to honestly deal with wrongdoing.
“Sometimes you have to betray your country in order to save it,” Kim
says.
In return bank investigators probed his phone records and e-mails,
and allegedly hacked into his personal AOL account. After determining he
was behind the leaks the bank put him on administrative leave for two
years before firing him on Christmas Eve 2010.
With nowhere to turn Kim was guided into the offices of the Washington,
D.C.-based Government Accountability Project–the only game in town for
public-sector leakers. “Whistle-blowers are the regulators of last
resort,” says Beatrice Edwards, the executive director of the group.
Edwards helped Kim file an internal case for wrongful termination (World
Bank staffers have no recourse to U.S. courts) and in a landmark ruling
a five-judge tribunal eventually ordered the bank to reinstate him
last May. Despite the decision, the bank retired him in September after
29 years of service.
The U.S. is beginning to notice. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee insisted on inserting a whistle-blowing clause in 2011 after
World Bank President Robert Zoellick
approached them for an increase in the bank’s capital. But because of
the supranational structure of the bank, the Senate’s demands are
ultimately toothless.
“We can’t legislate the bank,” explains a Senate staffer. “All we can
do is say, ‘We’ll give you this [money] if you do that [whistleblower
protection].’ But they say, ‘You can’t make us do that because we can’t
answer to 188 different countries.’ ”
