ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said that over 800,000 civil servants have been registered in MyAccount, a government initiative to digitize financial services. The project team told Rudaw English on Monday that they plan to expand this number to one million in the coming months.
"The KRG is pleased to announce that more than 800,000 public sector beneficiaries have now registered for MyAccount. This marks a major step toward the KRG’s target of banking over one million people through licensed and regulated banks," said the KRG in a statement sent to Rudaw English.
The MyAccount project, announced in 2023 by Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, is part of a government initiative to digitize salaries and improve the salary disbursement process. It also enables public employees to receive payments directly through the banking system.
The lion’s share of public sector employees registered with the initiative are in Erbil province, with nearly 400,000, followed by Sulaimani and Duhok, respectively.
The KRG stressed that the program is “being implemented in full coordination with the Central Bank of Iraq, with several partner banks now onboard.
MyAccount logo. Graphic: Rudaw
KRG registers over 800k employees for digital financial initiative
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"We remain on track to register over 1 million beneficiaries into the program in the next few months," the MyAccount team told Rudaw English on Monday. "To enable this, the process of delivering cards and ATM expansions has been accelerated significantly"
MyAccount serves as the Kurdistan Region’s alternative to Baghdad’s Tawtin (localization) initiative, which also aims to pay public sector salaries through bank accounts instead of distributing cash.
In Sulaimani, many have preferred Tawtin over MyAccount, citing skepticism about the KRG’s ability to transfer federal funds received from Baghdad.
“This month, more than 400,000 beneficiaries will receive their salaries electronically through a growing network of over 400 ATMs across the Kurdistan Region, including thousands of pensioners in a pilot phase,” the KRG stated.
As part of the latest deal between Baghdad and Erbil over financial disputes earlier this month, the salary domiciliation process in the Kurdistan Region must be completed “within three months.”