All Iranian expatriates have been eliminated from the list of subsidy receivers and high-income households who live inside the country are gradually being removed from the list, head of the Management and Planning Organization (MPO), Mohammad Bagher Nobakht said in a conference on Tuesday, ISNA reported.
In accordance with the Article 21 of the budget law, which was ratified in 2014, the administration is allowed to pay cash subsidies only to the low income earners, Nobakht said. "Therefore, the government has exerted efforts in the past ten months to carefully identify the affluent subsidy receivers by updating its databases in order to gradually omit them from the pool of cash subsidy receivers."
Regarding the parliament's objections to some clauses of the bill to exclude the households with incomes exceeding 25 million rials ($935 at official exchange rates) from subsidy receivers, which was recently ratified by the parliament's joint committee, Nobakht said the issue will be addressed in the parliament's next week meeting before final implementation.
According to the subsidy reform plan, introduced by former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and passed by the parliament in 2010, the government is to cut some of its subsidies on food and energy and spend the saving on cash payments. But generating the amount needed to cover the cash payments turned out to be a huge burden for the government. The total amount earmarked for subsidy payments in the next Iranian calendar year (starting Mach 21) is estimated at 480 trillion rials ($17.4 billion).
