New KRG cabinet will pass reform bill within a month - Gorran MP
"We will pass the reform bill in the first month of the new government," Ali Hama Salih, the head of the Change Movement (Gorran) bloc in the Kurdistan Region Parliament, told Rudaw TV on Sunday. "Nearly 70,000 people who have taken millions of dollars from this country through corrupt means will have their salaries cut."
The parliament passed a reform bill on February 27, 2018 that introduced reforms to the salaries of public employees and pensioners, including cleaning the list of beneficiaries, preventing duplicate benefits and double-salary holders, and institutionalizing the pension program.
Under the proposals, the KRG would have saved about a quarter of its current salary costs, 100-120 billion Iraqi dinars ($84-100 million).
The bill, however, never materialized as the parties accused each other of using the bill for political gain.
The KDP and Gorran signed a deal on government formation on February 18, 2019. The main point focused on passing the contested reform bill.
Asked whether they could do it, Salih affirmed: "We have reached an agreement on that. And this is the underlying point of the KDP-Gorran agreement."
If the bill is approved, officials will be given 90 days to implement the reforms.
Not reaching a deal would send the wrong message to the people of the Kurdistan Region, according to Gorran's Salih.
"If this agreement is not worked on and the reform bill not passed, we are telling the people of Kurdistan that the KDP-Gorran agreement was nothing but a big lie," he said.
In the meantime, it remains unclear when the new government will be formed as the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) are yet to ink a deal as the latter disagrees on what posts have been allocated in the new cabinet.
The KRG has suffered economic woes in the past five years as its budget share was slashed by Baghdad, oil prices plummeted, and it dealt with a costly war and IDP crisis due to the conflict with the Islamic State (ISIS).
The KRG had insisted that revenues haven’t been sufficient to meet its payroll. Therefore in late 2016 it introduced unpopular austerity measures including the salary savings system which saw civil servants’ salaries cut.
As Baghdad-Erbil relations normalized after Iraqi PM Adil Abdul-Mahdi took office and the 2019 budget was unanimously described as an improvement by Kurdish MPs in Baghdad, the KRG declared on March 8 an end to the saving system.
Leaders in the Kurdistan Region repeatedly describe 2019 as economically promising.