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This brings up a question I have on NGOs in general. When some bureaucrat distributes money to them, or even if congress were to directly send them money, what sort of reporting requirements do these NGOs need to comply with? A rigorous line by line accounting of every dollar they spend? No meaningful accounting? Somewhere in between? And if these NGOs do make reports, who gets to see them? It seems that any public money should be strictly accounted for in terms of what it is spent on, and the public needs to have ready access to this information.

When I led a mostly USAID-funded UNDP project in Afghanistan, we were required to have an outside consultant perform an M&E (Monitoring and Evaluation) report that focused on program effectiveness, not financial accountability. Other donor agencies such as JICA and DFID also did inspections and evaluations.

There were also financial reports, but we were under-budget and UNDP did that, so it was never an issue.

As for USAID, we prepared a map-based report called Geobase of all the projects USAID was doing in Afghanistan. We also produced the 3-W report, Who's doing What Where, that was used throughout the development organizations.

That said, there was an office or officer who was supposed to prepare a report of the all US expenditures in Afghanistan, and it never got done right. Of course, Afghanistan was a tough environment back, but that's not an excuse.

A marginally related incident comes to mind. I was in a meeting with all the donor agencies for the final presentation of the ANDS (Afghanistan National Development Strategy). The French donor rep asked about birth control, as a rising population lowered the development impact. The President's representative beat around the bush, but afterwards I heard him say he had already spoken to the President about it, but he knew the mullahs (islamic religious leaders) would never support it, so he couldn't pursue it.