MONROVIA – The Independent National Commission on Human Rights has turned its oversight powers inward, referring its own suspended chairperson to anti-corruption investigators. The move confronts an uncomfortable paradox: an integrity institution accused of the very misconduct it exists to check. At issue are a US$20,175.00 (L$3,679,113.00) UNICEF grant allegedly managed outside financial controls and a suspected dummy payroll. The Board says bank signatories were quietly narrowed down to just two senior officials, cutting out institutional checks. Its referral to the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission now demands a forensic audit and criminal investigation. The case will test whether Liberia’s accountability architecture can police its own watchdogs. Commissioners first raised alarms in 2022 without result, as THE ANALYST’s H. Matthew Turry reports.
Liberia’s Independent National Commission on Human Rights (INCHR), the country’s principal statutory watchdog for human rights, has taken the extraordinary step of referring its own suspended chairperson and two senior officials to the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC). The referral accuses them of corruption, payroll fraud, and the circumvention of internal financial controls surrounding a donor-funded United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) grant.
The referral targets suspended Chairperson Cllr. T. Dempster Brown, Executive Director Atty. Urias Teh-Pour, and Director for Planning Bah-wah Brownel. Addressing a press conference Tuesday, July 14, 2026, INCHR Acting Chairperson Cllr. Mohammed E. Fahnbulleh said the Board wants the LACC to launch a full investigation into allegations of corruption, financial misconduct, abuse of office, payroll fraud, and “any other offenses that may be disclosed by the evidence.”
He said the Board has invoked its statutory oversight authority under the INCHR Act and what it describes as its fiduciary duty to safeguard public resources. The Board frames the move as central to its mandate to uphold transparency, accountability, and good governance within Liberia’s public institutions.
The allegations surfaced only after a change in leadership at the top of the commission. Following the appointment of Acting Chairperson Fahnbulleh, the newly configured Board undertook what it describes as a routine review of the commission’s institutional records.
That review, according to Cllr. Fahnbulleh, quickly escalated into something far more serious. It turned up red flags regarding compliance with Liberia’s Public Financial Management Law, breakdowns in the commission’s own internal financial control procedures, and troubling questions about how public and donor resources had been administered under the previous leadership.
The Board’s language throughout the statement is notably careful. It repeatedly frames its findings as matters “raising concern” rather than proven fact, and it is explicit that the referral to the LACC is meant to establish, through independent investigation, whether the conduct in question actually broke the law. But the volume and specificity of detail in the statement, from dollar figures and dates to named individuals and a description of altered bank-signatory arrangements, suggest a Board that believes it has already assembled a substantial evidentiary basis before going public.
The UNICEF Grant
At the heart of the case is a US$20,175.00 (L$3,679,113.00) grant that the suspended chairperson, acting on the commission’s behalf, sought and secured from the UNICEF Liberia Office in October 2025. Records reviewed by the Board show UNICEF wired the funds to the commission on October 15, 2025, money intended to support a specific project tied to INCHR’s mandate. It is what allegedly happened after the money landed that has drawn scrutiny.
The Board says the grant was managed entirely outside INCHR’s standard financial control framework, in what it describes as a departure from the governance principles that are supposed to govern the institution’s handling of money. Most strikingly, the statement alleges that the authorized bank signatories for the project funds were quietly narrowed down to just two people: the suspended chairperson and the executive director.
That arrangement, the Board says, cut out other duly approved institutional signatories, including the Vice Chairperson, who would ordinarily sit alongside the chairperson as a check on commission accounts. The significance of that detail is not incidental, because multi-signatory requirements on institutional bank accounts exist precisely so that no single official, or even two acting in concert, can move donor or public money without a broader circle of oversight.
If the allegation is substantiated, the Board says, it would represent a deliberate circumvention of the very controls meant to protect transparency, accountability, and the proper stewardship of donor resources. In essence, it would mean two people arranging to become the only people who could authorize where the money went.
The scheme reportedly began to unravel not because of an internal audit, but because the donor itself raised a flag. A letter from the UNICEF Liberia Office dated June 24, 2026, revealed that portions of a report submitted on the commission’s behalf had been rejected. It was this single piece of correspondence, arriving from outside the institution, that appears to have prompted the current leadership to open the broader review of project documentation and financial records that ultimately produced the referral.
Since then, the Board says it has formally and repeatedly requested a complete paper trail on the UNICEF-funded project, including project proposals, grant agreements, financial reports, supporting vouchers, procurement records, contracts, bank records, implementation reports, and related correspondence. According to Cllr. Fahnbulleh, those records have still not been fully produced, despite the requests.
The Board frames this incomplete disclosure as itself an obstruction of its statutory oversight responsibilities. It cites the withholding as a key reason an outside, independent LACC investigation, with subpoena and investigative powers the Board itself lacks, has become unavoidable.
Alleged “Dummy Payroll”
Beyond the UNICEF grant, the referral covers a separate and potentially more sweeping allegation: that former employees and former commissioners remained on INCHR’s payroll long after they had left the institution, continuing to draw salaries and benefits they were no longer legally entitled to. Cllr. Fahnbulleh describes the arrangement bluntly as a “dummy payroll.”
According to the Board, the practice raises the possibility that money was processed and disbursed in the names of individuals with no ongoing lawful relationship to the commission. That pattern is a classic hallmark of what anti-corruption investigators elsewhere often call “ghost worker” schemes, in which payroll systems are padded with non-existent or no-longer-employed staff so that the associated salary payments can be diverted elsewhere.
The Board is explicit that it wants the LACC to go beyond simply confirming who was improperly paid. It wants investigators to trace where that money actually ended up, and whether it was ultimately redirected to individuals who had no legitimate claim to it whatsoever.
According to Cllr. Fahnbulleh, individuals whose payroll status requires verification are former Commissioner Pela Boker-Wilson, Dr. Niveda Ricks-Onuoha, Gloria M. Harris, Roseline Allison Bailey, and David Dahn, described as being among “many other individuals identified through examination of the payroll records.” The Board’s wording suggests the list of names under review internally may be considerably longer than what has been made public.
He emphasized that only a comprehensive forensic audit, paired with a full criminal investigation, can establish the true scale of the irregularities. Such an inquiry, he said, would pin down exactly who bears responsibility, quantify how much public and donor money may have been lost, and determine whether any Liberian laws were actually broken.
Echoes of a 2022 Petition
He noted that it is not the first time alarm bells have been rung about financial management at INCHR. As far back as 2022, four sitting commissioners formally petitioned Liberia’s Auditor General requesting an independent audit of the commission, citing concerns over financial management and institutional governance at the time.
According to the current Board, that requested audit was never carried out. Nearly four years later, with a new set of allegations now surfacing, some involving individuals whose payroll status stretches back further than the current leadership’s tenure, the Board argues that an independent investigation is not just warranted but “long overdue,” necessary to finally establish the facts, restore public confidence in the institution, and hold individuals accountable where the evidence supports it.
The gap between the 2022 petition and the present referral raises its own uncomfortable question for Liberia’s broader accountability architecture. It asks why a formal request from sitting commissioners for an audit of a human rights oversight body went unanswered for years, and what allowed the alleged irregularities described in the statement to continue in the meantime.
Pending the outcome of the LACC investigation, the Board has moved administratively against two of the three named officials. Executive Director Atty. Teh-Pour and the Director for Planning have both been suspended from the performance of their official duties, while Chairperson Cllr. Brown had already been suspended prior to the statement, which is what allowed the Acting Chairperson to take over and initiate the review in the first place.
The Board is careful, as institutions generally are required to be in such circumstances, to frame the administrative suspensions purely as precautionary measures taken in the interest of good governance, and not as findings of criminal liability. The statement explicitly affirms that all three individuals remain entitled to the full constitutional guarantees of due process and the presumption of innocence, unless and until a different determination is reached through the appropriate legal process. The Board has also called on the suspended officials to cooperate fully with LACC investigators and to make themselves available to assist the process.
What Happens Next
With the referral now made, the matter moves out of INCHR’s hands and into the LACC’s. Liberia’s anti-corruption body has the statutory authority to conduct its own independent investigations, including forensic financial audits, and, where evidence supports it, to refer cases for prosecution. The Board’s statement asks the LACC specifically to treat this case as a top priority and to conduct a “thorough, impartial, and independent investigation” into every matter it has flagged, from the UNICEF grant’s altered signatory arrangements to the alleged dummy payroll.
Should the LACC’s investigation substantiate the allegations, the Board says it expects “appropriate legal action” to follow in accordance with Liberia’s Constitution and laws, language that leaves open the possibility of criminal prosecution for any officials ultimately found to have broken the law. Equally, if the investigation clears the named individuals or finds the irregularities to be administrative rather than criminal in nature, that outcome would presumably end the matter without further legal consequence.
For now, the case rests on the strength of the paper trail the Board says it has assembled. It also rests on whether the records it says have been withheld can still be recovered and examined by outside investigators with stronger legal tools to compel disclosure than the Board itself possesses.
In closing its statement, the Board situated the referral within the commission’s core institutional identity. INCHR, it noted, is itself an integrity institution, established to promote respect for the rule of law, accountability, and the protection of fundamental rights in Liberia, which the Board says creates both a legal obligation and a moral responsibility for its current leadership to refer allegations of misused public or donor resources to the competent authorities rather than manage them quietly in-house.
The Board said it wants to be “unequivocally clear” that it maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward corruption, financial misconduct, abuse of office, payroll fraud, and any practice that erodes public confidence in the commission. It committed the current leadership to strengthening internal financial controls, enforcing compliance with the Public Financial Management Law, and ensuring that every public and donor dollar entrusted to INCHR going forward is managed transparently and lawfully.
The Board formally asked the LACC to treat the referral as a top priority and to pursue a thorough, impartial, and independent investigation into every matter disclosed in the statement. The referral, laid out at a press conference by INCHR’s Board of Commissioners, marks one of the more striking cases in recent memory of an integrity institution turning its own oversight powers inward, against the very leadership that ran it.