WASHINGTON — America is requesting billions of dollars to help train Iraqis to spend the money they already have.

That was the message this week in testimony before the House Foreign Relations Committee from the State Department’s senior Iraq coordinator to explain why Iraq would need $4 billion to help spend the $12.5 billion the Iraqi government already has in its accounts.

Speaking before the House Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight, David Satterfield said building what accountants call “budget execution capacity” was a top priority now for his provincial reconstruction teams.

“Why couldn’t Iraq spend these monies? Why couldn’t the oil [minister] spend the $3.5 billion in his capital investment budget? Only some 6% was actually spent,” he said. “The answer is not corruption. It’s not politics. It’s not security. It is literally the lack of mechanisms, the lack of the experience and capacity to spend funds which exist in Iraqi hands.”

Current and former American financial advisers to the Iraqi government explain that the problem of budget execution has persisted for the Iraqis since June 2004, when the Coalition Provisional Authority officially disbanded and turned over the country’s coffers to an interim government led by Iyad Allawi.

Hit hardest in the Iraqi government is the ministry of oil and the ministry of defense. While salaries of employees and soldiers are often paid on time, capital investments like new wells and new bases are not being made. The inability of Iraq’s military to spend money on new investments worried one military consultant who yesterday said that it could prevent necessary spending for the maintenance of bases, equipment, and vehicles the American military is giving Iraqis as part of its efforts to rebuild the Iraqi military. “There needs to be a certain amount of money spent each year on just the maintenance of this stuff,” this official said. “If they don’t have the capacity to spend this money, then it will turn into junk.”

One problem, according to a former Treasury official, is that there is no electronic system to count expenses and income for the individual ministries, local police stations, and even the military. “Every ministry has been functioning with a sturdy pencil, with handwritten paper records. I wish there was even carbon triplicates,” this former official said. “They take a great big white sheet of butcher paper and draw lines and columns.”

The lack of an electronic system has facilitated corruption, such as the over-billing of dummy contractors — a practice that has been the target of some prosecutions in Iraq. Less dramatically, it has slowed progress, causing orders to spend money to take days to process through the finance ministry. To this day, most Iraqi salaries are paid in cash that is delivered to local offices from the banks.

A consulting company, Bearing Point, has had a contract since 2004 to develop an electronic financial management system for Iraq’s government, but it has been slow going. To this day, most of Iraq’s provincial government offices are not connected to ministry of finance. The hope is that when this system is established, Iraq will have the banking infrastructure for automated teller machines.

Another problem facing the Iraqis is that there are hardly any accountants. Part of the American reconstruction effort will go to training procurement officers, accountants, and budget experts to be attached to local police stations and military units.

The former staff director for what is now the House Foreign Relations Committee, Hillel Weinberg, said Congress began quietly to ask questions about the accounting systems in 2005. He said, “Budget execution is extremely difficult. What everyone says about Iraq, is that people have a difficult time making decisions. It used to come from the top. One of the problems, their structure, the infrastructure, how you do this is lacking. It is not something that we have been able to get a handle on.”

Lawmakers in the House at least appear to be losing patience. Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York, on Tuesday chastised the Iraqis for spending only 20% of the $6 billion they had budgeted last year for reconstruction projects. “The United States has invested $2 billion in Iraq’s oil infrastructure, an important investment, I’m sure. But for reconstruction to be successful, we can’t want it to succeed more than do the Iraqis,” Mr. Ackerman said.

Mr. Ackerman voted Friday for a supplemental budget bill that gave the Bush administration most of the $4 billion it requested for Iraq reconstruction. But that bill, like the Senate’s this week, contains a timeline for withdrawal certain to draw the president’s veto. The maneuvering will mean that Congress will have to draw up another supplemental funding bill sometime when they return from spring recess after April 15, the date when the military will run out of money for the Iraq war and be forced to make cuts in training and vehicle maintenance.