UNITED NATIONS – After months of fits and starts, the United Nations will present today its new policy on whistle-blowing in hopes of fostering a “comfortable environment” for staffers to report wrongdoing by their higherups, according to spokesmen. Critics said the new policy should have included a clearer definition of whistle-blowing and described some of the policy’s parameters as “restrictive.”

The policy will be presented to the press today by the undersecretary-general for management, Christopher Burnham, who will also introduce other policies designed to address failures highlighted by the oil-for-food scandal. A former member of the Bush administration, Mr. Burnham will describe a new financial disclosure form that officials will be required to fill out, and announce the appointment of a former head of the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, Rajat Kumar Gupta, as a special U.N. envoy on reform, with a symbolic salary of $1 a year.

The top investigator of the internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, Barbara Dixon, told reporters two weeks ago that her department does not use the term “whistleblower.” With regards to a policy on whistle-blowing, “There is not one yet,” she said then.

In November 1997, however, Ms. Dixon was one of the sources of the congressional General Accounting Office, which said in a report to then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Helms, that OIOS “has established systems and special controls for providing confidentiality to whistleblowers.”

A 2004 internal survey found that most U.N. employees fear reprisals for complaining about their superiors. In a June 2004 letter to employees, Secretary-General Annan promised a new whistle-blowing system, and a year later Mr. Burnham’s office began writing one. It was presented for revisions to several external bodies, as well as to the staff union, and was completed last week.

“They are making progress, but they’ve got ways to go,” the international reform director of the Washington based Government Accountability Project, Melanie Beth Oliviero, told The New York Sun yesterday. The GAP was consulted on the policy, she said, but some of its advice fell by the wayside. What is missing is a clear definition of whistle-blowing, she said, as well as a fully independent entity to which those who wish to disclose wrongdoings could report. “Reports of misconduct should be made through the established internal mechanisms,” reads the new policy. While another section says complaints could also be made through an “external mechanism,” Ms. Oliviero said that conditions for that are too “restrictive.”

Several U.N. officials have been prosecuted recently by the federal authorities and the Manhattan district attorney. Ms. Oliviero, however, noted that the new policy does not provide protection for U.N. employees who want to report violations of national law.

A U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said that all such reports could be made as violations of staff rules. He added that many of the complaints would be addressed to a future “ethics office,” which would be an independent department at the United Nations, reporting directly to the secretary-general. He left open the question of who could complain about the secretary-general himself.