The picture of mismanagement will give ammunition to critics of the United Nations, which is now supervising aid relief for the Asian tsunami disaster that could ultimately involve tens of billions of dollars.

The audits, which the United Nations had declined to release, were made public by a commission of enquiry appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan last year to answer allegations of widespread corruption in the programme.

The commission is headed by former US federal reserve banking chief Paul Volcker, who told The New York Times last week that the documents contained "no flaming red flags."

But in a briefing paper released with the documents, Volcker said internal UN auditors also had failed to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein's regime siphoned off billions through illegal kickbacks.

Oil-for-food, the UN's largest aid programme ever, was set up to monitor the purchase of humanitarian supplies by Saddam's Baghdad government, which was under sanctions for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Funded by oil sales, the goods were intended to ease the impact of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis -- while UN oversight was supposed to keep revenues from the 64-billion-dollar programme out of the pockets of Saddam and his cronies.

"There was no examination of the oil and humanitarian contracts," Volcker said in his paper.

The audits show UN managers were lax in examining the contracts and often failed to verify the work by inspectors hired by the programme to oversee the shipment of goods.

Shipments into Iraq were supposed to be checked to prevent Baghdad from receiving anything with possible military use -- a crucial condition of the sanctions.

But a 1999 audit said one contractor, Lloyd's Register, billed the United Nations for 1,800 man-days of work when its inspectors were not even at their posts, and also sent its team to Iraq three months before shipments began.

The overcharges for those two instances alone added up to 3.35 million dollars, the audit said: "No on-site verification was performed to determine that the contractor had delivered the services as contracted or invoiced."

Stephane Dujarric, a UN spokesman, said it was "already clear ... that there were deficiencies in the management" of the programme but said the United Nations was waiting for an interim report from Volcker later in January.

The audits, however, have provided more fuel for other investigations into the programme in the United States, notably by the US Congress.

Senator Norm Coleman, who heads one of the Capitol Hill probes and last year called on Annan to resign, said the dozens of audits were simply another piece of the puzzle.

The documents "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," Coleman said.

There are concerns some of the money is now funding guerrilla fighters carrying out the deadly insurgency against Iraqi and US forces in the run-up to Iraq's first-ever democratic elections this month.

The UN official who ran the 1996-2003 programme, Benon Sevan, has denied any wrongdoing.

The United Nations repeatedly refused to make the audits public until their release by the Volcker enquiry, which posted them on its website (www.icc-offp.org).

Among other revelations is that the United Nations may have overpaid billions of dollars in reparations claims for Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which sparked the 1991 Gulf War.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.