US embassy in Harare paid its staff in cash for 10 years without approval from Washington

The United States embassy in Harare has been paying its locally employed staff in cash in United States dollars since 2015 without the required authorisation from the Treasury Department in Washington, a report by the Office of the Inspector General in the State Department says.

The report, released this month, says the embassy paid its locally employed staff in US dollars instead of in the local currency without the authorisation of the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs. 

“Although the Bureau of African Affairs required the embassy to request this authorization annually, during the inspection, the embassy was unable to provide documentation that the annual requirement was waived or that it had requested authorization after 2015,” the report says.

“Because the embassy paid its LE staff in cash with US dollars totaling almost $25 million from FY 2023 to FY 2024, it incurred additional costs for cash replenishment purposes. Specifically, from FY 2023 to FY 2024, according to documentation provided by the embassy to OIG, the embassy incurred $276 000 in bank fees for cash replenishments.”

The report says the embassy told OIG that it paid staff in US dollars for more than a decade because of the instability of the local currency and unpredictable actions of the Zimbabwean government.

It says the OIG, however, found that approximately 84 percent of LE staff already received a portion of their salary in US dollars, through electronic funds transfers, to banks in Zimbabwe and internationally.

The report says the transaction costs incurred in paying staff in cash could have been put to better use.

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