WASHINGTON – A group of Republican senators assigned by the leadership to investigate the oil-for-food scandal is planning a multi-pronged assault on the United Nations next session.

With Secretary-General Annan steadfast in refusing to share internal audits of the oil program that allowed Saddam Hussein to steal billions, leading senators are now eyeing legislation to tie America’s U.N. dues to cooperation from Turtle Bay with congressional investigations. The legislative push from Congress could reopen the bitter funding wars of the 1990s over the United Nations that eventually led Mr. Annan to promise a series of reforms many lawmakers say have never been implemented.

The secretary-general yesterday was again in the spotlight over the brewing scandal when he said he was caught unawares that his son Kojo was still being paid by a Swiss-based consulting company, Cotecna, which is under investigation for its lax oversight of Iraqi imports under U.N. sanctions. Of the story, first reported in The New York Sun, Mr. Annan said, “Naturally, I was very disappointed and surprised. I had been working under the understanding that this ceased in 1998. I had no expectation that the relationship continued.”

Frustration with Mr. Annan on Capitol Hill will also fuel continued oversight from the Senate and House of the U.N. oil-for-food program and a push for the State Department to document again progress on transparency and corruption at the U.N., a request the Republican Congress dropped after President Bush took office in 2001.

Senator Ensign, a Republican of Nevada, told the Sun yesterday he is planning to reintroduce in the next session the U.N. Oil-for-Food Accountability Act, legislation that would withhold 10% of the American contribution to the U.N. budget in the first year and 20% in the second until Mr. Annan authorized the release of internal U.N. audits of the program and lifted the immunity of U.N. officials from prosecution in American courts.

“We are planning to reintroduce the legislation,” Mr. Ensign said. “Right now, the United States contributes so much of the budget for the United Nations. But every time we turn around the United Nations is doing something harmful to the United States. Obviously, examples include the whole Iraq situation, the human rights commission when they tried to kick us off. It is those types of actions that cause concern here. When you are paying a quarter of all the bills there, I would not want them necessarily to be pro-United States, but at least not being anti-United States is not too much to ask.”

The legislation, which attracted 15 co-sponsors last year, stalled in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where its chairman, Senator Lugar, a Republican of Indiana, refused to even hold a hearing on the proposal. As a result, Mr. Ensign settled for an amendment on the bill authorizing defense spending that instructs the State Department to lobby aggressively for the access to oil-for-food documents.

A spokesman for Mr. Lugar, Andy Fisher, told The New York Sun yesterday that Mr. Lugar was unlikely to take up the U.N. funding legislation until the United Nations completed its own investigation.

Mr. Ensign yesterday said he was prepared to send his bill to the floor of the Senate.

“I expect we are going to try to be a little tougher on that, especially depending on the investigation. We will take it to a full floor vote if we need,” he said. “I think the new class is going to give us more reform-minded people, but also the more the scandal comes out and gets more ink and play on the airwaves it will help turn some of the other members.”

Mr. Ensign is one of six senators, including the chairman of the Senate subcommittee investigating criminal wrongdoing in the oil-for-food program, Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, and Senator Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, on the Senate’s U.N. oil-for-food task force. In July the lawmakers met with the head of the U.N. probe into the scandal, Paul Volcker. Mr. Ensign said yesterday that the former chairman of the Federal Reserve asked the senators to call off their oversight while he did his work.

“Paul tried to talk us out of what we were doing, the investigations, he thought it would interfere with what he was doing, we thought it would strengthen what he was doing. It was cordial, but we walked away disagreeing,” Mr. Ensign said.

Since then, the Senate has pushed for access to 55 reviews from the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. A November 16 letter from Mr. Volcker to Mr. Coleman and the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, Senator Levin of Michigan, denied a request to turn over the audit reports of the program. Furthermore, Mr. Volcker in the letter asked the senators not to subpoena U.N. officials for their probes.

Yesterday, however, the usually reserved American ambassador to the United Nations., John Danforth, urged Mr. Volcker to release the documents to Congress.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, he said, “Everything should be handed over to the congressional committees, and it should be done as quickly as possible.”

The former senator cautioned, however, “Now as far as an investigator is concerned, it is possible that documents can be flying all over the place, that witnesses can be flying all over the place so that it impedes an investigation. I’m not for chaos. I’m not for a sort of chaotic everybody asks everybody, everything at the same time kind of situation.”

Mr. Annan was at first supported in 1996 by the Clinton administration for secretary-general as a reform-minded bureaucrat who would bring more accountability to the institution’s peacekeeping operations. At the time, the former North Carolina senator, Jesse Helms, had effectively frozen American payments to the institution over concerns that U.N. peacekeeping operations effectively placed American soldiers under the command of foreign generals and wasted money on programs the American people would not support. It was not until Mr. Annan agreed to a series of reforms – which included the creation of an independent inspector general and drafting a code of conduct for U.N. employees – that Mr. Helms relented and allowed America to pay back past debt to Turtle Bay. In 2003, America’s account with the United Nations became current.

But it’s looking more likely that America will begin to withhold funding from the United Nations again. Far from being supportive of the coalition that toppled Mr. Hussein’s regime, Mr. Annan announced this year that he believed the invasion was illegal under international law. On October 31, in the final week of the election, Mr. Annan wrote a letter to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair urging them to call off the offensive into Fallujah, a base for foreign terrorists and former Baathist officials who have waged a campaign of suicide attacks, car bombs, kidnappings, and videotaped beheadings of aid workers.

“This is a perfect storm in the U.S.-U.N. relationship,” a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former senior Pentagon and State Department official, Lee Feinstein, said yesterday.

“In addition to the oil-for-food scandal and Security Council meltdown over Iraq, you also have some of the statements coming from the secretary-general about Iraq that have irritated administration officials and members of Congress, giving the most critical members of Congress an opportunity to resurrect the anti-U.N. campaign of the 1990s.”