The biometric registration of employees, which was launched on October 10 and will continue until February 10, has revealed “large scale misuse and fraud,” in some cases involving private persons receiving up to 5 wages from the government, according to one government official who spoke to Rudaw on condition of anonymity.
The mandatory electronic system is expected to reduce the number of ghost workers who do not actually work but are paid by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) through falsification of personnel or payroll records.
The system is designed to prevent individual employees from receiving more than one salary, effectively limiting fraud and mismanagement of public assets, authorities have said.
“For the first time we have reliable statistics about the number of people on the government payroll, which will be the base for our future decisions,” Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani told his cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
Government data show that nearly 1.4 million people are officially employed by the KRG, consuming an estimated 70 percent of its overstretched annual budget.
The new payment system is modern banking technology that uses biometric authentication to identify the user and authorize the payment through a bank account verified by fingerprint scanning.
The payment reform is part of larger austerity measures that the KRG has struggled to implement in collaboration with the World Bank to tackle the ongoing financial crisis that has gripped its economy since early 2014. The economic reforms have caused outrage across the Kurdistan Region with several riots and strikes.
Earlier this year, KRG spokesperson Safeen Dizayee revealed that only an estimated 740,000 employees among the 1.4 million who are on the KRG’s payroll are doing actual work, with the rest of the salaries going to ghost workers or employees that receive more than one salary which he said had burdened the government's total expenses.
The KRG hopes the new electronic system will prevent mismanagement of public assets and reduce rising unemployment in the country.
