Kurdistan
A person at a bank and the logo of the Kurdistan Regional Government's 'My Account' initiative. Photo: Rudaw
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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Almost all civil servants in Duhok and Erbil provinces are receiving their salaries through the bank, the deputy chief of staff to Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani said on Friday.
Aziz Ahmed said in a post on X that “98% of all civil servants in Erbil and Duhok received their salaries through banks this month.”
In Sulaimani, where there has been opposition to the program, Ahmed said there are “significant improvements” and 23,000 civil servants in that province are now paid digitally.
The MyAccount program, which was announced in 2023 by Prime Minister Masrour Barzani as part of a government initiative to digitize services and improve the salary disbursement process, enables public employees to receive payments directly through the banking system.
Previously, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) made salary payments in cash and it often took more than a week to disperse the salaries. Some pensioners lost their lives while waiting in long lines on payday.
“The painful images of our citizens waiting outside gov’t buildings - often in the rain and summer heat - will be a thing of the past,” Ahmed said, adding that a pilot program for 4,000 pensioners will start “in a month.”
More than 550 ATMs have been installed in 200 different locations and there are plans to install more.
MyAccount is an alternative to Baghdad’s Tawtin initiative, also known as localization, which aims to pay the salaries of Iraq’s and the Region’s civil servants through bank accounts. It is part of a broader effort to modernize Iraq's financial infrastructure and ensure transparency in the public sector’s payroll system. Some, especially in Sulaimani, advocate for Tawtin over MyAccount because of skepticism regarding the KRG’s ability to pay the funds that Baghdad sends to cover the salaries.
Paying the salaries for its workforce - totaling 429,000 without including Peshmerga forces, according to MyAccount - has been a struggle for the KRG for a decade. Payments were frequently delayed or reduced because of a financial crisis that further deteriorated in March 2023 when Erbil’s oil exports were suspended following a court ruling. The KRG is now dependent on money from Baghdad, in addition to some local revenue, but has repeatedly accused the federal government of not making regular payments of its share of federal funds.
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