After a year in office, Secretary-General Ban has made a small stride fighting against the United Nations’ resistance to outside scrutiny.

Unlike his predecessor, the U.N. careerist Kofi Annan, Mr. Ban came from a government, South Korea, where public scrutiny is the norm, and where even loopholes require the approval of a relevant authority. When Mr. Ban’s top aide, Kim Won-soo, last year opted to take advantage of a housing subsidy offered to his wife by Seoul, the aide first went to the new U.N. ethics tsar, Robert Benson, to make sure the subsidy violates no rule. More on that later. Meanwhile, Mr. Ban last year ordered all high ranking officials to file a detailed financial disclosure with the accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and also recommended that they make the disclosure public, as some did last week on a dedicated Web site http://www.un.org/sg/PublicDisclosure.shtml.

There is much to be desired in this process: Too many officials opted out of filing the public disclosure form. An option in the form allowed others to decline public disclosure, and U.N. traditionalists, such as the former top aide to Mr. Annan, Iqbal Riza, may have checked that box to express disagreement with the whole process.

Also, the public disclosure forms are very sketchy. It is almost impossible to glean from them any data about possible conflicts of interest. And good luck finding any information about spouses who may conduct commercial business with Turtle Bay. Spouses of U.N. officials are not included in financial disclosure forms.

The issue of spouses, as anyone following Senator Clinton’s presidential race knows, could get tricky. One U.N. rule bans its officials from receiving housing subsidies from any government, but how about an official residing with a husband or wife who receives such subsidies?

As a top official explained it to me recently, the idea behind the subsidy rule is twofold: U.N. officials’ loyalty should be with the organization and not with their country of origin; and in an organization where all are meant to be equal, there should be no gap between officials coming from wealthy countries, which can afford sizable subsidies, and poorer ones.

Anyone believing that it is possible to erase national loyalty by joining the U.N. should read the new book about how Sergei Tretyakov ran a Russian spy ring from Turtle Bay, “Comrade J.: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War.” And the idea that the influence of Zimbabwe should equal that of, say, China, belongs in historical ashbins alongside the most discredited Marxist dreams promoted by U.N.-based Soviet spies.

Discredited and impractical as it is, a rule is a rule. Mr. Kim, one of the hardest working officials ever to grace the U.N. bureaucracy, decided not to take advantage of Turtle Bay’s offer to reimburse him for moving his residency to New York. Instead he opted to allow his government to subsidize an apartment where he lives with his wife, a 23-year veteran of the foreign ministry who now works at the South Korean U.N. mission. Mr. Benson told me recently in an e-mail message that when the arrangement was disclosed to the ethics office, “I had informed Mr. Kim that since” according to the relevant rules “it is the staff member who is not to accept supplements or other subsidies from a government, the fact that his wife was receiving the housing subsidy in her own right from her employer was permitted.”

Was this the correct interpretation of the U.N.’s “Staff Regulation 1.2(j),” or “article 47 of the Standards of Conduct for International Civil Service” — the two relevant rules cited in the above answer? Probably. I have no evidence to question the independence of Mr. Benson, the first chief of the newly created ethics office.

The bottom line is that the ethics office now exists and, along with the financial disclosure forms, increasingly helps officials of member-governments to scrutinize Turtle Bay. It is a step in the right direction, but not enough. The next step would be to make it easier for all of us to access more such information. Through our taxes, after all, we pay the bills.

bavni@nysun.com