Integrity Commission launches Iraq pension audit

Shafaq News- Baghdad

Iraq's Federal Integrity Commission, the country's anti-corruption watchdog, said on Friday it had begun auditing pensioners' files and cross-checking data held by the National Board of Pensions (NBP) to identify pensions paid without entitlement and recover the money.

The work is being carried out by committees the commission chairs, which will match the NBP's data against records held by the electronic payment companies that handle pensioners' salaries, after correcting and reconciling the figures, "to establish how much was paid without entitlement and take legal action to recover it."

In an earlier report on the board's work, the commission identified about 40,000 Qi Card biometric payment cards, used to pay pensions, that had been issued based on outdated records, despite having called months earlier for pensioners' data to be updated and for a halt to the same pensioner being registered under more than one pension number.

In Nineveh province, a committee formed by official order is auditing 102,867 names of pension recipients tied to martyrs and people wounded in terrorist attacks. Comparing Martyrs Foundation records with the data previously supplied to the NBP, the committee found that pensions had been paid to ineligible recipients because the board had not requested those records from the foundation.

The commission said records dating back to 2022 needed to be cross-checked against the Martyrs Foundation's suspension data to identify fictitious beneficiaries receiving pensions and eliminate duplicate records, and that large numbers of recipients had not had their pensions stopped since audit committees were first formed in 2022, and that the committees now report monthly on the number suspended.

A further cross-check with the Health Ministry and the National Digital Transformation Center identified 16,384 deceased people whose pensions had not been stopped. The commission said the board had been unable to trace pensioners' names in its database in Baghdad and the provinces, causing significant waste of public funds, and that roughly 19,321 records had been suspended in Al-Anbar province alone.

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