KRG reports $69B federal funding gap
Shafaq News- Erbil
Federal transfers to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) fell about 105 trillion Iraqi dinars ($69.1 billion) short of its calculated budget allocations for 2014 through 2025, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said on Saturday.
A report issued by the KRG’s Department of Media and Information in coordination with its Finance and Economy Ministry put allocations after deductions for national expenses at about 146 trillion dinars ($96.1 billion), compared with transfers of 41 trillion dinars ($27 billion). It accused Baghdad of failing to honor budget commitments and imposing excessive deductions.
According to the report’s calculations, federal transfers over the 12 years covered the equivalent of 46 months of public-sector salaries out of 144. That included one month in 2022, five in 2023, 11 in 2024 and 10 in 2025.
The tables recorded no transfers in 2016 or 2017. Transfers reached 400 billion dinars ($263.2 million) in 2022, 4.69 trillion dinars ($3.1 billion) in 2023 and 10 trillion dinars ($6.6 billion) in 2024, before falling to about 9.59 trillion dinars ($6.3 billion) in 2025.
The share of the federal budget transferred to the KRI averaged 2.04% annually, the report said. It listed the KRI’s budget share as 17% from 2014 through 2017 and 12.67% from 2018.
The report’s tables cover federal budgets totaling about 1,767 trillion dinars ($1.16 trillion), with the KRI’s calculated share exceeding 245 trillion dinars ($161.2 billion) before deductions. They list more than 65 trillion dinars ($42.8 billion) as its contribution toward national expenses.
Challenging those deductions, the KRG said national spending categories had expanded from 10 to 100. The report put national expenses for 2023 through 2025 at 142.3 trillion dinars ($93.6 billion) and calculated the KRI’s contribution at 18.1 trillion dinars ($11.9 billion). It argued that a fair contribution would have been 9.9 trillion dinars ($6.5 billion), a difference of 8.2 trillion dinars ($5.4 billion). Its annual table, however, lists contributions totaling 20.5 trillion dinars ($13.5 billion) for those years.
Despite contributing toward those expenses, the KRI received no corresponding allocations for its Peshmerga Ministry under national defense spending or from domestic and foreign borrowing, the report said.
Citing the 2024 census as putting the KRI’s population at 14.14% of Iraq’s total, the KRG called for its budget share to be reconsidered. It rejected being held solely responsible for the financial crisis, saying the dispute extended beyond transfers to how its allocations and deductions were calculated.
