UNITED NATIONS — As U.N.-led humanitarian efforts are underway in the aftermath of what the North Korean government is calling the worst flooding in a decade, critics of the communist regime are raising questions about what they say are Pyongyang’s past exaggerations of disasters in the country.

U.N. officials have been instructed by Secretary-General Ban to independently assess the damage from floods caused by heavy rains during the last 10 days; North Korea has claimed that at least 300 are dead or missing and that 300,000 have been left homeless. While not dismissing the disaster in a disaster-prone country, critics say Pyongyang has good reasons to make the flood’s aftermath look worse than it actually is.

In recent years, the communist regime “has tended to exaggerate losses from natural disasters to obtain as much outside aid as possible,” a Seoul-based Korea University Professor, Nam Sung-Wook, told the French news agency AFP yesterday.

“There is no doubt that this is a disaster situation,” the U.N. assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Margareta Wahlström, told reporters yesterday.

Asked if the United Nations could independently confirm North Korean numbers, she told The New York Sun that U.N. representatives have not “counted every single individual.”

“This is work that we’ll have to continue within the next few days,” she said.

A major international agency, the U.N. Development Program, withdrew its personnel from Pyongyang earlier this year after allegations that they violated the agency’s own rules. A full audit of U.N. activities in Pyongyang is ongoing, and its results are weeks overdue. Aid from U.N. agencies, meanwhile, has “shrunk quite consistently over the last year, for lack of funding, mainly,” Ms. Wahlström said yesterday.

But international support for the cash-strapped regime of Kim Jong Il may reappear in the aftermath of the latest disaster as Pyongyang is poised to break out of its international isolation. President Roh of South Korea next week plans to make only the second visit there by a South Korean leader since the 1950s war. He will attend a summit meeting with Mr. Kim.

Also, for the first time since assuming office on January 1, Mr. Ban met with North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pak Gil Yon, this week to discuss regional issues and Pyongyang’s request for humanitarian aid.

“I assured him that the United Nations will be prepared to render whatever possible humanitarian assistance and help” for the North Korean “government and people to overcome this difficulty, and he appreciated the offer,” Mr. Ban told reporters after the meeting. The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator’s Asia office yesterday issued a release based on reports by Pyongyang, which said that this week floods have left “as many as 300,000 people homeless.” The government-run news agency claimed 30,000 houses were damaged, and North Korean sources were quoted as saying 300 people are dead or missing.

When Pyongyang reported last summer that floods have left thousands of people homeless and hundreds dead, U.N. representatives were barred from visiting the affected areas. By contrast, Ms. Wahlström said that this week, U.N. representatives did have access to the disaster areas.

“Deforestation” is one reason heavy rains affect North Korea so much harder than its southern neighbor, Ms. Wahlström said. South Korea has replanted most of its lost forestry in recent decades, she added, and international assistance may be needed to help the North to do the same.

According to a report on the Fox News Web site last year, a sharp increase of North Korean insurance claims has been noticed recently and has led representatives of major international insurance companies to suspect Pyongyang of carrying out an insurance scam. “The North Korean claims are supported by meticulous paperwork, something at which the North Koreans excel,” a lawyer for major insurers, Michael Payton, told Fox News. “Where death certificates and hospital reports are required, the regime’s attitude is ‘Tell us what you want, we’ll give it to you.'”