Jacque Parker

Please Understand This One Basic Principle: Every line item in the 2027 Budget Law is denominated in Iraqi dinars. Every primary revenue stream that funds it SOMO crude sales, transit fees, customs arrives in US dollars. The exchange rate is the conversion constant baked into the arithmetic of the entire law. Salaries for seven million-plus public employees, pension obligations, the Kurdistan regional share, provincial transfer formulas, sovereign debt service on the external obligations, reconstruction tranches all of it is IQD math running on a USD intake assumption at a fixed peg. You cannot pass that law at the old rate and then move the rate after passage. You would detonate the entire fiscal framework retroactively. Move the rate upward post-enactment and the dinar-denominated expenditure side inflates against the actual purchasing value of the incoming dollars instant structural overcommitment in some lines, unallocated surplus in others, and the Finance Committee gets to explain why a law they voted on no longer means what it said. Move it downward post-enactment and you gut the salary lines and the development budget overnight. Either direction, you trigger emergency amendment legislation, which Iraq does not have the calendar time to process before January 1. So the rate must embed in the draft itself, before October 15th, or the 2027 framework is built on sand.