ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Financial rewards will be given to anyone who reports a corruption case within government institutions upon verification, the Kurdistan Region’s Commission of Integrity said on Tuesday, stressing that the whistleblowers’ personal details will be protected.
In a letter signed last week but declassified on Tuesday, the Commission stated that the reward will be given to “any employee or citizen who provides information to our commission regarding the occurrence of a legal violation or corruption within institutions, through any means made available to notify.”
The anti-corruption body further noted that the reported information “against any employee or official of any rank or position” must be “substantiated by evidence.”
“Our commission guarantees the protection of the informant's name and address, and their rights shall be safeguarded,” it further noted, adding that the anti-corruption efforts “seek to protect public wealth and restore it to the Region's treasury.”
Meanwhile, a well-placed source within the Commission told Rudaw English that the move aims to uncover cases of “bribery, misappropriation of public funds, illicit enrichment, embezzlement” or any other type of corruption they witness.
“We have provided three methods for reporting corruption: a hotline, email, and physical presence, including through the complaints box,” the source said.
He further noted that the scale of the rewards has yet to be determined and that “it will be decided later by a committee, with plans to base the scale on the gravity of the cases and their types.”
High-value embezzlement has risen sharply in the Kurdistan Region, with the average monetary value per 149 reviewed court cases surging from 622 million to 4.5 billion Iraqi dinar ($475,000 to $34.4 million) according to a joint report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Kurdistan Region’s judicial authority in December 2025.
“Half of the new cases involved public institutions such as the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Health, pointing to areas where oversight and internal controls can be strengthened,” the report noted.
The Kurdistan Regional Government has in recent years introduced specific structural and judicial mechanisms to handle financial crimes. A key institutional reform was the April 2024 establishment of Erbil’s Fourth Criminal Court, a specialized chamber dedicated exclusively to prosecuting complex, high-value financial corruption.
Prior to that, in December 2017, the KRG completely excluded grand corruption offenses from general amnesty laws to prevent convicted officials from evading prison time.
