Since the IAEA uses UN rules for assessed contributions to the general budget, it’s also unavoidable that some states will contribute more money on safeguards than is “received” in safeguards implementation. However, they “loose control” (loosely speaking) on how money is spent once it flows into the general budget. That’s why the IAEA prefers to see a general budget increase, and why many member states want to contribute through separately accounted – earmarked – projects.

Some people, spearheaded by Henry Sokolski I seem to recall, have advocated a safeguards fee, in which a heavy user of safeguards “services” pays for it. Personally, I sympathize with the idea – if you really want that shiny bulk reprocessing-plant, you shouldn’t expect others to pick up the safeguards bill for that. At the same time, it will appear unfair, perhaps even inappropriate, to ask Tuvalu, with it’s non-existing fuel cycle, to cough up some USD 20k for submitting NIL reports, so I can see why the idea hasn’t gained much traction.

The late reporting statistics, I suspect, is partly due to the fact that people don’t want to spend a huge amount of time and money chasing CSA-AP-SQP states which are late. I think that’s understandable. Chasing NIL reports must be viewed as an ultimate waste of time – a bit like stringently safeguarding VOAs. And I note that most states with significant nuclear activities have reported on time, although there are troubling exceptions to this.

There is also a hidden cost in safeguards implementation, namely the parallel national cost of running a national authority, receiving inspectors, and filing national reports. I suspect that many late reporting states have not adequately filled positions, or trained staff to fill out their NIL reports.

http://armscontrollaw.com/2013/06/10/mark-hibbs-on-the-leaked-iaea-safeguards-report/

Its up to you whether you allow this comment to stand. I hope that you will and that we can engage about the substance of our views.
Dan

Some circumstantial evidence that funding buys influence was provided by wikileaks, but it is not at the level of causation:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/1202/WikiLeaks-cable-portrays-IAEA-chief-as-in-US-court-on-Iran-nuclear-program

But the point is not there is evidence of causation but that there there is a clear conflict of interest.

Not only is >65% of funding of IAEA from US+allies, but in the case of Iran, AP reported ~80% of Intel against Iran is from the US. Some of that ‘evidence’ has shown to be of rather poor quality.

My view on the overall situation is here:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/05/16/reset-on-iran-now/

I am not advocating that NAM nations pay the full tab: one option would be just to reduce the overall tab, of course.

The other option is what I actually suggested — that nations pay their current amounts to a blind UN fund, once removed from the IAEA to remove the (perhaps only perceived) conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, seriously: what evidence do you have that the identity of the countries referred to the UNSC is a function of the distribution of IAEA budget shares? And I mean causation, not correlation?

The data in Annex II.6 breaks down the data by country according to “total number of inspections,” “person days of inspections,” and “calendar days in the field for verification.” This can give you the relationship in each country between these two, but the data does not give you any conclusions about whether any inspection goals were attained in each country.

e.g. more 65% of the overall IAEA budget comes from USG+allied governments:

http://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC56/GC56Documents/English/gc56-12-rev1_en.pdf

The USG alone provides ~25% of the IAEA budget.

Whether intended or not, this would appear to play some role in which countries are targeted for closer inspections, and are referred to UNSC once any CSA breaches are detected.

Far better would be some mechanism to fund the IAEA without informing them of precise amount coming from each member nation — eg. via a UN pool fund. This would be one step towards guaranteeing some measure of impartiality.

When I look at the 2012 SIR–or any annual SIR in my files for that matter–what I see is a kind of anthropological snapshot of what during any calendar year the IAEA Department of Safeguards (and maybe by way of osmosis the Board of Governors, the DG’s office, the biggest safeguards-funding member states and the author of a particular report) seem to believe is most important or what is currently on their minds.

So for 2012–as you correctly point out–there is no discussion in the report about inspection goal attainment, beyond what is stated in the “Background to the Safeguards Statement and Summary,” which mentions that the IAEA’s “in-field activities [are] carried out to verify states’ declarations,” and the tables in Annex II which provide disaggregated data on number of inspections per state.

Instead, the report for 2012 is heavily weighted toward the cost of safeguards implementation. There is concern with the cost of inspection activities, but there is no breakdown or analysis of inspection goal attainment in the 2012 report.