Finance Associate (Oversight and Compliance)

UNOPS is an operational arm of the United Nations, supporting the successful implementation of its partners’ peacebuilding, humanitarian and development projects around the world. Our mission is to help people build better lives and countries achieve sustainable development.

UNOPS areas of expertise cover infrastructure, procurement, project management, financial management and human resources.

Working with us

UNOPS offers short- and long-term work opportunities in diverse and challenging environments across the globe. We are looking for creative, results-focused professionals with skills in a range of disciplines.

Diversity

With over 4,000 UNOPS personnel and approximately 7,000 personnel recruited on behalf of UNOPS partners spread across 80 countries, our workforce represents a wide range of nationalities and cultures. We promote a balanced, diverse workforce — a strength that helps us better understand and address our partners’ needs, and continually strive to improve our gender balance through initiatives and policies that encourage recruitment of qualified female candidates.

Work life harmonization

UNOPS values its people and recognizes the importance of balancing professional and personal demands.

THOH

Thailand Operations Hub (THOH) is a UNOPS business unit under the UNOPS Asia Regional Office and it was established to better support, develop and oversee the UNOPS portfolio of projects in South East Asia and the Pacific.

The Hub comprises three main portfolios –THOH Thailand, THOH Indonesia and THOH Pacific and provides a wide range of services including Project Management, Transactional HR, Financial, and Procurement to clients that include other UN entities, INGOs and governments/government agencies donors.

UNOPS THOH is hiring for the position of Finance Associate. Under the direct supervision of the Head of Support Services, the Finance Associate will provide financial and administrative support to the timely processing, recording, monitoring, and maintaining if financial transactions and accounts relating to payments and receipts in accordance with UNOPS’ financial rules, regulations, policies, and processes.

Summary of Key Functions:

1. Implementation of operational strategies
2. Budgetary and project costing support
3. Accounting, billing and administrative support
4. Oversight, compliance and reporting
5. Knowledge building and Knowledge sharing

Duties and responsibilities

Reporting to the Head of Support Services, who provides general guidance and remote supervision from THOH head office in Bangkok, the Finance Associate is responsible for the following:

• Full compliance with UNOPS rules and regulations of financial processes, financial records and reports and audit follow up; implementation of the effective internal control framework.
• Elaboration of the content of internal Standard Operating Procedures in Finance in consultation with the direct supervisor and office management.

• Extraction of required financial information from UNOPS project agreements and set up of necessary accounts in line with existing UNOPS financial policies and procedures.
• Information gathering for admin budgets preparation
• Information gathering for annual business planning (annual target and budget setting) and entry of budget details in ERP
• Preparation and processing of budget revisions for management projects
• Review of budget revisions for client projects
• Maintenance of budget implementation databases and support the development and maintenance of admin budgets monitoring and reporting tools
• Review and adjustment of project expenditures/obligations against approved budgets.
• Coordinating project financial closures
  • Presentation of researched information for planning and status of office’s financial resources
  • Provision of inputs for implementation of cost-saving and reduction strategies in consultation with the office management.
  • Preparation of cost sharing agreements, follow up on contributions within the office’s resource mobilization efforts
  • Periodically track and report on the projections and performance of the recoveries of Locally Managed Direct Costs (LMDC) 

• Review and confirmation of appropriateness of operational transactions processed through the interpretation and determination of applicable policies, regulations, rules
• As alternate to the Finance DoA holder, review of payment requests for completeness prior to processing, ensuring that documentation needed is complete and that all required procedures are fulfilled to enable the payment.
• Review and confirmation of validity of charges by verifying authorized amounts, ensuring certification of availability of budget and funds.

• Support to the preparation of monthly admin projects expenditure schedules and quarterly and year-end reports.
• Frequent contact with other finance staff in the organization in the preparation of payments, data reconciliation, client reporting, or audit activities.
• Assist in preparation of the annual work plan of compliance and capacity building activities (desk review, field verification, audit follow up, risk assessment, action plan follow up, etc).
• Support in monitoring and reporting on compliance with local SOPs and UNOPS rules, regulations, policies, procedures, etc
• Support in conducting capacity assessments as required per the donor, such as assessment of financial management capacities of newly selected SRs/IPs.
• Liaise with Programme/Project Managers and conduct necessary project visits to obtain all certified documents evidencing the completion of an activity, incurring of expenditure and identity of the party/vendor.
• Support the review of financial documents to monitor the SR/IP’s financial risk and updating in the risk tracking sheet.
• Run review procedures to detect unusual activity; review processes templates and procedures, including those associated with monitoring and evaluation.
• Conduct through spot checks and appropriate systems that relevant procedures and supporting documents are exhaustive and consistent;
• Track and periodically report on the status of implementation of recommendations resulting from SR/IP verification missions and internal/external audits.
• Prepare and submit periodic reports on issues and any material weaknesses identified during the review period.
• Liaise with hub Project Management Office colleagues on tracking and reporting on annual targets, cash flows and other KPIs
• Monitor client project budgets and cash statuses, and escalate issues to supervisor to proactively manage over-expenditures
• Assist the Compliance Officer to verify that all SR/IP audit findings are resolved in a timely and appropriate manner.
• Provide support to Compliance Officer to respond to Local Fund Agent (LFA) queries during SR expenditure verification by LFA;

• Training of  colleagues upon requests from portfolio managers, the supervisor and other finance officers in setting projects, budget revisions, troubleshooting and understanding of the processes on day to day financial transactions, reporting and other related tasks
• Synthesis of lessons learnt and best practices in Finance.
• Sound contributions to knowledge networks and communities of practice

Education:

• Completion of secondary school (high school diploma) is required.
• A relevant advanced university degree in Accounting, Commerce, Business Administration/Management or related specialization is preferred.
• Candidates with a bachelor's degree in the above-mentioned field and at least two (2) years of relevant work experience may be considered. 
• Relevant certification in financial management or accounting a distinct advantage.

Experience:

• Minimum of six (6) years of relevant working experience in the areas of finance, accounting, or audit/financial compliance is required in combination with a high school diploma.
• Prior experience in auditing and/or compliance preferred.
• Prior experience in financial analysis & interpretation, and financial performance monitoring, control and reporting added advantages.
• Prior experience with ATLAS, ERP and/or oneUNOPS a distinctive advantage.
• Prior related experience in the UN system is an asset.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills are required.

Language:

• Fluency in English is required.

Contract type: Local ICA (LICA)

• Please note that the closing date is midnight Copenhagen time
• Applications received after the closing date will not be considered.
• Only those candidates that are short-listed for interviews will be notified.
• Qualified female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.
• UNOPS seeks to reasonably accommodate candidates with special needs, upon request.
• Work life harmonization - UNOPS values its people and recognizes the importance of balancing professional and personal demands. We have a progressive policy on work-life harmonization and offer several flexible working options. This policy applies to UNOPS personnel on all contract types
• UNOPS seeks to reasonably accommodate candidates with special needs, upon request.
• For staff positions only, UNOPS reserves the right to appoint a candidate at a lower level than the advertised level of the post
• The incumbent is responsible to abide by security policies, administrative instructions, plans and procedures of the UN Security Management System and that of UNOPS.  

It is the policy of UNOPS to conduct background checks on all potential recruits/interns. Recruitment/internship in UNOPS is contingent on the results of such checks.