“But,” he said, referring to the government, “they are determined to spend this money on development. They see it as a priority.”

Senators Levin and Warner pointed out that in 2007, for example, Iraq actually spent only 28 percent of its $12 billion reconstruction budget, according to the accountability office. But even that number could overstate the success rate in most of Iraq, because $2 billion of the spending took place in the relatively peaceful confines of the northern Kurdish region.

And in another troubling sign, the report said that from 2005 to 2007, Iraq devoted only 1 percent of the operating expenses in its budget to maintaining reconstruction projects that had been built with either American or Iraqi money. That finding raised fresh questions over whether the huge investment in some of those projects would have any long-term impact.

Like so many statistical measures from Iraq, the ones in the new report are likely to be used to support opposite positions on how much the United States should continue spending and how long it should stay in the country, said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington.

The figures could be used to argue that because the Iraqi ministries still do not have the capacity to spend their own money, further assistance from the United States is called for, Ms. Alexander said. Or the huge oil revenues could be seen as proof that Iraq has the resources to solve its own problems if it would only use the money.

But one finding that is sure to raise questions all around is the enormous pileup of cash in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as several Iraqi banks, Ms. Alexander said. The money in New York is a legacy of a system set up to handle Iraqi oil revenues when the country had no capacity to do so on its own.