Private schools, colleges and universities: Integrity Commission findings on unpaid fees and revenue shares, unrenewed licences and weak oversight (from 2016 to 2024)

Reports of the Federal Integrity Commission's prevention department describe weak oversight of private education. In April 2017 a team that visited Baghdad's education directorates called for the collection of about IQD 2 billion owed by private schools to the Ministry of Education over licence renewals. In March 2024 a further report found 489 private schools and 215 kindergartens in Baghdad whose licences had not been renewed since they opened, so that renewal fees and other dues went unpaid, and 150 kindergartens opened without approval. In August 2024 a report on private universities and colleges said Law No. 25 of 2016 had weakened the Ministry of Higher Education's oversight; that the ministry had not suspended admissions at 34 private universities and colleges that had not paid its share of 3 percent of their annual revenues since 2016; and that 46 of 72 institutions were called university colleges although they were at college level. Separately, in December 2022 the Commission said the head of accounts of al-Taff University College in Karbala had signed fictitious loans worth IQD 1.39 billion, of which IQD 121.9 million was recovered.