UNITED NATIONS – Staffers at the United Nations point to the recent exoneration of a manager as a glaring example of the lack of transparency inside the organization.

The staff union plans to meet today to formulate a response to an internal investigation on abuse of power allegations leveled against the head of the Office of Internal and Oversight Services, Dileep Nair. Union leaders consider Mr. Nair’s exoneration in that probe a “whitewash” and a “cover-up.”

In Washington, meanwhile, two members of the House of Representatives, Henry Hyde, a Republican of Illinois, and Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, introduced legislation yesterday, that is bound to increase the pressure on Mr. Nair’s office.

OIOS, the U.N.’s internal investigations organ, is in the headlines because it was originally charged with looking into allegations of corruption in the oil-for-food program. Messrs. Hyde and Lantos now want all OIOS reports to be made available to congressional investigations, calling on the State Department to pressure the U.N., which is dependent on American funds for supplying 22% of the U.N.’s annual budget.

The U.N. staff union has scheduled a meeting for today in order to formulate a response after its demands that Secretary-General Annan look into allegations abuse of power by Mr. Nair ended with a statement that cleared him of all wrongdoings. According to staffers, the union will have a very negative response to the exoneration.

“In my opinion it was a complete whitewash,” a member of the union’s committee, Guy Candusu, told The New York Sun yesterday. Several other staff members, who spoke on condition of anonymity in fear of reprisals, said that the investigation by an undersecretary general for management, Catherine Bertini, was unsatisfactory.

They pointed to the union’s demands for the probe against Mr. Nair, made in a letter to Mr. Annan last April, being unanswered for six months. In response to a Sun article last June, an Annan spokesman said that he had instructed Ms. Bertini to clear the matter “as quickly as possible.” The answer, nevertheless, came only last week, a day after a reporter publicly asked U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard what happened to the probe.

In a letter to the union’s president, Rosemarie Waters, Mr. Annan’s chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, yesterday wrote that Ms. Bertini found that “no staff regulations or staff rules were violated” by Mr. Nair. The letter, which was obtained by the Sun, nevertheless said that Mr. Nair was advised to “exercise due caution when making personnel-related decisions.”

Mr. Nair had been accused of promoting personal allies while overlooking others who might have been more qualified, in addition to sexual misconduct and harassment. A staff member familiar with the inner workings of Mr. Nair’s office told the Sun that the U.N. has no rules protecting whistle blowers, and therefore several of Mr. Nair’s accusers decided not to press their case for fear of losing benefits.

Asked about allegations that Ms. Bertini’s probe was declared completed after a public press question, which added fuel to allegations that it was a quick-fix answer rather than a real probe, Mr. Eckhard told the Sun yesterday that the timing was “coincidental and not suspicious at all.”