BAGHDAD — Iraq’s government has an unusual money problem as much of the world grapples with a credit crunch — it can’t spend its oil riches fast enough.
The U.S. is trying to change that by training Iraqi bureaucrats struggling to emerge from a centralized system in which nearly all decisions — from where to build a water-treatment plant to which workers would do the job — came from the top.
“Our efforts are devoted to helping the Iraqis spend their own money,” said Marc Wall, the U.S. Embassy’s coordinator for economic transition in Iraq. “We’ve zeroed in on it in the last year or two.”
The issue came to the fore over the summer when the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) predicted Iraq could finish the year with as much as a $79 billion cumulative surplus because of oil revenues and unspent funds from previous budgets.
The August report drew outrage in Congress, where lawmakers asked why the Iraqis haven’t spent more of their own money on reconstruction efforts while U.S. taxpayers shell out some $12 billion a month for Iraq — most for military operations.
