KRG`s Biometric Payment System Amidst Political Interests

Dr. Bayad Jamal Ali

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) launched the process of the electronic payment system in October. In the cities of Erbil, Slemani and Duhok employees have already started to have their electronic cards and biometric data registered. This process of registering the Kurdistan Region’s employees will continue for a total of three months according to the plan put forward.

The process will let public employees collect their monthly salaries using an electronic card in accordance with the registration of their names and their information within the biometric system. Operation centers have already been created to monitor this process around the region.

The goal of this process is to solve the issue of “ghost employees” and track the details of public employees’ payroll, as well as remove duplications of people that receive more than one salary. At the current moment, government employees account for around 1.4 million employees.

In theory the launch of the Biometric Payment System is a positive move forward in minimizing fiscal spending, and decreasing the burden on the public sector. However, is it applicable practically?

The issue of having such a massive number of public employees in relation to a relatively small population, whether they are ghost employees or active employees, has been created by all the political parties that have participated in government over the past 25 years. Along the many different KRG cabinets, as a form of gaining votes and political loyalty each political party, according to their power, has put their own people in positions and gave salaries to party members that don’t even work in any government institutions. Some have even received two to three different salaries at the same time.

The distribution of this free money led to a brief increase in the purchasing power of the Kurdish economy, followed by a sharp downfall as it killed all forms of productivity, as well as growing rates of inflation in almost all products, especially real estate.

The challenge in applying the biometric system is to find out where does power really reside – if the government could apply this system with complete transparency then it would have important economic value for the region, and decrease the fiscal burden, however, the political parties will lose the allegiance and votes of those people that will have their salaries cut.

Will the political parties allow the government to destroy the flow of free money in a loyalty system that they have “built”? Since these parties are the ones running the government, will they accept their political and economic interests vanish? And what is the incentive to so?