The  people who are paid to root out waste, fraud, corruption and wrongdoing in the sprawling United Nations are often not qualified to do their jobs, and are hampered by insufficient funding and potential conflicts of interest because the very people they are investigating control their careers and budgets, according to a report by U.N. experts on how the world organization investigates itself.

Very often, the U.N.'s internal investigators are part of the management structure they may be called on to probe, the report adds. Nor do most of the U.N.'s array of funds, programs, agencies and other organizations have any consistent means of making sure that investigations are followed up when wrongdoing is discovered.

The report's stark conclusions amount to a renewed call for accountability by one of the few independent groups of investigators in the U.N., a small conclave of top-level experts based in Geneva that is known as the Joint Inspection Unit, or JIU.