CBI to Control Civil Service Pay

The Central Bank of Iran will be in charge of paying the salary of civil servants from the start of the next Iranian year (starting March 21, 2017).

Rahmatollah Akrami, deputy minister of economy for financial supervision and treasury, said the central bank is working on fundamental measures to help the treasury, mainly through digitalization, ISNA reported on Thursday. 

“Formerly, representatives from public-sector organizations referred to the treasury and received their employees’ salaries after handing the required data on CDs, but the new platform directly transfers the money to each employee’s bank account," he said.

"The other advantage of digitalizing the treasury operations is that governmental bodies would not be able to avoid paying taxes and insurance fees after deducting them from the salaries."

More than 16% of Iranians were working in the public sector by September 21, according to the Statistical Center of Iran.

Back in August, Akrami announced that CBI has developed a platform for managing and supervising the government’s resources called NASIM which stands for the Persian equivalent of “modern comprehensive system of CBI”.

According to CBI’s website, NASIM in the first phase will be used to accumulate the government’s resources in a single account in the central bank, with the level of access to the account strictly supervised and monitored.

In the second phase, NASIM would host payments and transactions of government entities. This means CBI would pay the government employees’ salaries, “based on the set caps”.

Managing government resources gained traction after the scandal pertaining to astronomical salary of executives at state-owned entities erupted in July. The scandal prompted President Hassan Rouhani to enforce drastic anti-corruption measures such as capping executive salaries, including those of ministers and bank CEOs.   

Transferring the government’s accounts from agent banks to the Central Bank of Iran is a major step in promoting transparency and avoiding dodgy practices related to expenditure.