Liquidity shortage delays Syrian Govt. salaries as “Sham Cash” outages recur

 At the start of every month, when salaries for government employees in Syria are due, the salary payment application “Sham Cash” repeatedly goes offline for several days, preventing workers from accessing their transferred wages.

The management of the “Sham Cash” application attributed these outages during February to “technical reasons,” noting that new updates were introduced to address what it described as the “decimal issue,” in addition to adding a confirmation step before executing transactions and enabling users to set a default currency within the app. However, the application stopped working again as the time came to disburse March payments.

On the other hand, employees believe the problem goes beyond a mere technical malfunction, especially as it recurs monthly. Salaries of certain ministries are delayed each time, with accusations directed at administrative accountants as being responsible for the delays.

According to our correspondent, citizens head to exchange company branches to withdraw their salaries, but these companies confirm that withdrawals or transfers via the “Sham Cash” application are not possible due to the technical malfunction, noting that the service outage may last for several unspecified days.

Recently, the finance minister of Syria’s interim government stated that the issue of transfers related to employee salaries by salary agents had been resolved, affirming that salaries would be paid on time without delay.

However, our correspondent confirms that five days have passed since the beginning of the month without salaries being paid, while delays continue to be justified by technical issues in the “Sham Cash” application. Last month also witnessed delays in the salaries of some ministries until the final third of the month.

Following investigation, sources told ANHA agency, including an employee at the central bank that the primary reason behind the delay in salary payments is the lack of liquidity, resulting from delays in the arrival of successive batches of newly printed currency to the central bank.

The delays have sparked a wave of widespread criticism on social media platforms, where employees and citizens expressed their frustration, attributing it to the urgent need for salaries amid worsening living conditions, rising prices, and low wages.

Before the most recent increase, an employee’s salary did not exceed 1.2 million Syrian pounds. Employees believe that the repeated justification of application outages is no longer convincing, given the regular recurrence of the issue.

Observers believe that the “Sham Cash” application described by some as “of unknown identity” has come to dominate all state employees’ salaries, which were previously disbursed through Syria’s six public banks. They also note that the application appears to be moving toward handling most electronic payments previously managed by public banks, including electricity, water, telecommunications bills, and other government services.

In a related context, cybersecurity expert Jihad Abdul Ghani stated last month in remarks to ANHA agency that managing the salaries of hundreds of thousands of employees and handling their financial data as if they were ordinary files capable of being transferred or hosted outside the country without any controls poses a major risk, describing it as “sheer madness.”

Abdul Ghani added that “no country in the world allows this,” considering it a reflection of the absence of a clear vision for managing Syria’s digital financial system, as well as weak awareness of the importance of cybersecurity and the sensitivity of the data held by the application.

He explained that all countries regard digital sovereignty as an essential component of state sovereignty, no less important than political or economic sovereignty, noting that citizens’ financial data are not merely numbers but sensitive information revealing details about income, spending, lifestyle patterns, and employment affiliations.

The expert also stated that restarting the application after outages or resolving delays in salary payments does not represent a fundamental solution, but merely postpones the problem. He emphasized that the real solution requires a clear decision to build a national digital financial system that respects digital sovereignty and adheres to international standards, or to transform “Sham Cash” into a genuine digital financial institution subject to governance, oversight, and international standards.

ANHA