A TV presenter and field reporter told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “Trusted members in the army and internal security forces told me about colleagues of theirs making deals and agreements with their direct superiors. The purpose of such agreements is for the members not to go to work throughout the month, as long as they give the officers half of their salaries. The members then go work as taxi drivers or any other private profession.”
The reporter told another corruption story of when he was in Samarra (125 kilometers, or 77 miles, north of Baghdad) to cover a military operation. “We were surprised by the arrival of a committee from the Office of the Inspector General in the Ministry of Defense to audit the administrative aspects in the leadership of Samarra’s operations. The inspection lasted four days, and the committee members distributed salaries themselves to see if there were any possible ghosts.”
“The committee did not find any ghost members, which was no surprise. The officers had already known about the committee’s inspection a week earlier and they instructed the ghost members to attend and receive their salaries themselves,” the reporter said.
The accountant of al-Mahawil camp (100 kilometers, or 62 miles, south of Baghdad), Arkan Hussein, told Al-Monitor his estimates of the corruption deals' profits, “The salary of a ghost soldier is around 1 million dinars a month [about $800], and about $400 goes into the pockets of the officers. If an officer has at least 10 of these ghosts, he would get about $5,000 per month, not to mention other officers who hide dozens of ghost soldiers, in addition to other salaries and privileges that the leaders benefit from.”
This scene is recurring today in most military and civilian workplaces. The ghost employees quickly go to their workplace the moment they are summoned, and as soon as things calm down and the inspection committees leave, they go back to their other job. Meanwhile, the state budget pays millions of dinars for those ghost soldiers and staff members who are hard to find amid the corruption spread in the Iraqi scene.
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