The Palestinian Authority announced on Friday that an external audit of its new welfare program determined that it is being properly implemented to ensure that recipients are not incentivized to carry out terror attacks against Israelis.

The PA commissioned the audit from international consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), hoping that a “kosher” stamp from a respected independent company would legitimize a reform of its welfare program that has long been demanded by the international community.

Ramallah also aims to combat assertions from both Israel and the US that PA payments to the families of terrorists have continued, despite the establishment of the new welfare program, which is said to condition stipends strictly on a recipient’s financial status, rather than the length of their prison sentence or whether they were injured or killed as a result of the conflict with Israel.

The PA is hoping that the results of the A&M audit will be enough to convince the US to conduct a similar review of the program so that Washington can deem Ramallah to be in compliance with Congressional legislation that bars aid to the PA so long as payments to prisoners based on the length of their sentence continue.

That law — the Taylor Force Act — requires the US secretary of state to update Congress every 180 days on whether the PA has ceased the old controversial welfare scheme, which critics dub pay-to-slay. The last report to Congress determined that it was still in place, but it relied exclusively on open-source information from the Israeli government and several organizations that have long been critical of the PA.

The PA has invited the US to conduct a more thorough review of the welfare program by sending a team of diplomats, treasury and intelligence officials to Ramallah to conduct an audit similar to the one just finished by A&M.

A Palestinian official suggested that conducting the audit now would make good use of the period leading up to the October Israeli elections, given that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government........

© The Times of Israel