DUBAI, Nov 9: The United Nations is able to put a price tag on political corruption -- estimating that up to $1.6 trillion in public assets move across borders each year through networks such as money laundering or into secret holdings.

The much harder question is how to reclaim the black funds and monitor nations to make sure public money stays in the treasuries.

This is the challenge for hundreds of envoys from the United Nations, World Bank and government watchdog groups in meetings beginning on Monday in Qatar’s capital, Doha.

The five-day gathering is the latest attempt to give some enforcement authority to a four-year-old UN anti-corruption pact backed by 141 nations, from the United States and many Western nations to countries with deep-rooted corruption such as Afghanistan and Zimbabwe.

On the top of the agenda: seeking measures to hunt down diverted public funds and dent monitors pore through their books. Meanwhile, creating a system to follow the money trail and bring back the looted funds faces the same hurdles that sidetrack auditors and police: secretive bank laws in tax haven countries and political cultures -- including the Gulf states -- with no traditions of public accountability.

“We hope to have a commitment to action,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance minister who is now managing director of the World Bank. “We’ve had a lot of talk. Now we’d like to see some action.”

One of the key roadblocks is working out international accords that give UN and World Bank teams the ability to track and return stolen public assets.

A UN report estimated every $100 million recovered could fund full immunisations for 4 million children or provide water connections for some 250,000 households.

“We have to think in these terms,” she said from Doha. “This is not just fighting corruption, but bringing the money back to improve the lives of the people.”

Yet even trying to work out a monitoring system for governments remains at an impasse.

Watchdog groups, such as Transparency International, are pressing for a wide-ranging review process that would allow academics, civil society leaders, journalists and others to assist UN officials in examining a country’s fiscal openness.

Such calls, however, have met with resistance from nations such as Pakistan, China, Iran and Russia, activists said.

“Public officials need to be held fully accountable to the public they serve,” said Huguette Labelle, chairwoman of Transparency International, who is attending the conference. “When all the public money is on the table in a full and independent review, then it will be much harder for anyone to shift funds to some fiscal haven somewhere.”

She said delegates were split over peer review and on the publication of findings.

Some countries want to evaluate and report their own progress instead of being reviewed by other signatories and some signatories oppose the publication of reports on their progress, Ms Labelle said at the conference.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told the conference: “I urge you, as called for in the convention, to agree before Friday on a review mechanism.” Without such a mechanism, “we have no way of knowing how effective the convention is, how successful countries have been (or not) in their efforts,” Costa said.

The convention was signed in 2003, but a mechanism to measure compliance of its signatories has yet to be established.—Agencies