UNITED NATIONS – One of the major recent findings of the United Nations-approved investigation into the Iraq oil-for-food program was that its managers might have attempted to steer in-house auditors away from looking into potential wrongdoing at Turtle Bay.

This finding by Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, might indicate that his investigators are concentrating on the now-defunct program’s heads, including director Benon Sevan, who has been accused by an American investigator, Charles Duelfer, of accepting a bribe from Saddam Hussein in the form of oil vouchers.

Mr. Volcker, however, chose to frame the issue in a form of a question, which looked to some in Washington as an indication of the investigation’s limitations in uncovering the scope of wrongdoing in the program.

In a briefing paper that was released Sunday night, Mr. Volcker indicates that the team that managed the program might have steered the auditors away from investigating activities at Turtle Bay, encouraging them to poke around in Iraq instead. The question, as Mr. Volcker framed it, is whether the auditors of the Office of Internal Oversight Service were doing their job as a U.N. in-house watchdog, or were they “subject to inappropriate management influence?”

OIOS had a “preoccupation” with elements of the oil-for-food program “outside New York,” according to Mr. Volcker. “The lack of focus on headquarters functions,” he added, “appear[s] to have deprived the U.N. of a potentially powerful agent in helping to ensure accountability.”

When asked about it, OIOS auditors told Mr. Volcker’s investigators that they had a “chronic” staff shortage, and that “the advice of OIP management was to emphasize scrutiny of activities in Iraq.” OIP, or the Office of Iraq Program, was headed by Mr. Sevan until the program was dissolved in early 2004. Mr. Sevan continues to be employed by the U.N. on a salary of $1 a year, so he can remain available for Mr. Volcker’s investigators.

In his report, which was described by U.N. Spokesman Stephane Dujarric yesterday as “just one snapshot of the program,” Mr. Volcker falls short of describing the motives Mr. Sevan’s office might have had for influencing OIOS auditors, or whether the OIOS might have let themselves be influenced.

The House Government Reform Committee’s chairman, Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican of Connecticut, said that the question the released audit reports raised was, “How was the U.N. internal watchdog effectively neutered?”

The released audit reports, as well as Mr. Volcker’s observations, “do not answer even a fraction of the questions we have been asking or will be continuing to ask as our investigation moves ahead in the months to come,” Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican of Minnesota, said in a statement.

We “continue to have concerns with the ability of [Volcker’s] investigation to be thorough and conclusive,” said Mr. Coleman, the first American legislator to call for Secretary-General Annan’s resignation.

Mr. Annan contended yesterday that all the released material shows is “that the [oil-for-food] program was being audited and that attempts were made to try to correct,” whatever was wrong in the system.

Mr. Annan spoke in Asia, where the U.N. is coordinating its largest humanitarian effort since oil-for-food. “The tsunami effort, like oil-for-food, is a humanitarian program on an unusually large scale,” Mr. Dujarric said yesterday, adding that the U.N. has received a “generous” offer from the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to help and track all the donations.