CBI Enforcing Transparency in State Payments

The implementation of the national scheme of moving all government accounts to the Central Bank of Iran will bring all the resources to a central treasury that the government can oversee, said the CBI governor.

"Moving government accounts to CBI seeks two major goals. First is the transparency of state balance sheet and the other is to maintain constant supervision on statements in order to prevent any financial corruption," Valiollah Seif was also quoted as saying by CBI's official website.

Seif noted that the measure would go a long way toward boosting transparency in the country's banking system.

He noted that President Hassan Rouhani is considering a long-term solution for preventing any abuse of government resources in the future.

The scattering of accounts made it pretty hard to supervise them properly, therefore a number of banks labeled them as private resources and allocated loans from them, which led to unhealthy relations between account holders and the banks.

"The current government is the first to take such strong measures to make its balance sheets transparent," Seif added.

In line with this, the government has discarded the old payment system of checking documents and instead utilizes new technologies to make electronic payments.

In addition to the central treasury, Tehran and Alborz provinces' treasuries were also equipped with the new system. Electronic checks not only expedite the payment process, but also enhance supervision and precision.

CBI is determined to expand the system throughout the country, for which bank experts and central treasury representatives have been paying visits to provincial capitals to explain the process and equip the treasuries in 15 provinces so far.   

 Aside from moving all state-run companies' accounts to CBI, the bank also took charge of disbursing the salaries of civil servants directly since past two years. It started with a thousand employees back in December 2015 and reached 1.5 million this April while in November 2016, the government managed to pay the salaries of 900,000 Education Ministry employees all at once.

All of this is a preamble to materializing President Rouhani's vision of paying the employees of all three branches of government through CBI, which will ease the process, increase supervision and prevent any irregularities.