ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Iraqi Finance Minister Taif Sami on Sunday said that a delay in submitting Iraq’s budget table is attributable to a failure in resolving disputes between Erbil and Baghdad, despite an agreement being reached between the two governments in recent days.

Sami on Sunday was hosted by the Iraqi parliament’s finance committee, during which she laid the blame for a delay in submitting the budget table on fluctuations in oil prices and the failure to resolve budget disputes with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

“The delay in submitting the tables is due to two factors: fluctuating oil prices and the failure to resolve disputes with the [Kurdistan] Region,” the state-run Iraqi News Agency (INA) quoted Sami as telling the committee, adding that “this situation hinders the financing of the federal budget.”

The Iraqi government and the KRG have been at loggerheads over the management of the Kurdistan Region’s oil fields and the disbursement of the Kurdistan Region’s civil servant salaries for years, with the latest episode coming in May after Sami notified the KRG that they will not be funding the Region’s civil servant salaries, arguing that the Region had already exceeded its annual budget share in May.

Following Sami’s message, funding the salaries of civil servants in the Kurdistan Region were halted.

Public employees in the Region have yet to be paid for the months of May and June despite and agreement being reached between the two governments on Wednesday, whereby the Kurdistan Region has agreed to hand over 230,000 barrels of oil to the federal government’s State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO) for export, in addition to paying 120 billion Iraqi dinars in non-oil revenues to Baghdad as the federal treasury’s share.

Following the announcement of the deal, Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani “the KRG has demonstrated maximum flexibility and has been committed to fulfilling all its obligations.”

“There is no point in preparing the tables while the region continues to fail to pay its financial obligations, in addition to the impact of fluctuating oil prices and accumulated debts on the federal government's financing capacity,” Sami told the finance committee.

Prime Minister Barzani on Sunday said that “0ur understanding to hand over revenues [to Baghdad] is based on the constitution. The constitution stipulates that the Region should hand over 50 percent of revenues to Baghdad,” during the opening ceremony of Erbil’s Emergency Water Project.

“They say that we cannot have any revenues and say that we must hand them all over to them,” he added.