A senior Iraqi official has ignited a new dispute over the fate of about $140 billion in public revenues, as Iraq presses ahead with corruption investigations involving high-ranking officials at the oil and electricity ministries.
The cases center on allegations that tens of millions of dollars and billions of Iraqi dinars were stolen through contracts suspected of being fake.
The developments come as the Iraqi government faces mounting financial and political pressure ahead of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s visit to the United States in mid-July.
The government is also grappling with efforts to bring weapons under state control, complete the formation of the government and confront financial strain caused by a drop in Iraqi oil exports after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The pressure has prompted Baghdad to seek alternatives to secure state employees’ salaries for the next three months.
Missing $140 billion
In a televised interview broadcast two days ago, former Finance Ministry undersecretary Masoud Haider said the state treasury had received about 455 trillion dinars over the three years of the previous government, equivalent, by his estimate, to about $345 billion.
Haider said operating spending and public-sector salaries totaled about $205 billion, then questioned the fate of the remaining $140 billion.
Haider, a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said spending on infrastructure projects, including overpasses in Baghdad, could not explain the gap.
He accused the Finance Ministry of blocking his access to data from the accounting and budget departments while he served as undersecretary.
He said the restriction was imposed because of his ethnic and party affiliation and presented an official document that he said barred the two departments from dealing with him without the minister’s approval.
Haider said he informed former Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of what he described as a legal violation, but said Sudani took no action.
Former Finance Minister Taif Sami denied the accusations. In a statement, she said Haider’s remarks were “baseless and not supported by any reports or official documents issued by the relevant oversight authorities.”
Sami said oil revenues are monitored and audited by the Federal Integrity Commission and the Federal Board of Supreme Audit, as well as by international auditing systems that track oil exports and reconcile exported volumes with collected revenues.
She said the disappearance of the cited sums would be “impossible” without their appearing in official records and reports.
She said non-oil revenues had also grown in recent years as a result of reform measures, including the introduction of point-of-sale systems and follow-up with public companies to collect dues and transfer them to the public treasury after audit by the Federal Board of Supreme Audit.
On revenues from the Kurdistan Region, Sami said the file differed from other federal revenues. She said the region’s revenues had not been transferred to the federal treasury in a way that would allow them to be included in the accounts cited.
Sami said maintaining public trust in financial and oversight institutions required accuracy and reliance on facts and official documents, not estimates or accusations unsupported by evidence.
Major budget changes
On Iraq’s severe financial crisis, lawmaker Hussein al-Daraji said in press remarks that the time left this year was not enough to prepare and pass a 2026 budget draft in parliament.
He said the government was instead preparing a draft 2027 budget, which he expected to be sent to parliament in October or November.
Daraji said the government planned major changes to the 2027 budget law, making it different from previous budgets in how it is prepared, how its tables are structured and how spending is set.
He said the decision to bypass the 2026 budget was driven by accounting issues stemming from the advanced stage of the fiscal year. The state, he said, is still spending under a temporary one-twelfth disbursement mechanism, based on the Financial Management Law and the previous three-year budget.
According to the parliamentary finance committee, the government and parliament have agreed to focus technical efforts on preparing the 2027 budget in an economic format with new spending tables.
The draft is expected to be referred to parliament before the end of the year, with the aim of reducing the deficit and passing it before the start of the new fiscal year.
