Economists explained the scheme for refusing loans to evaders from the army

Russian banks want access to the register of electronic summonses in order to comply with the norms of the recently adopted law and refuse loans to evaders from military service. With a request to provide such an opportunity, the National Council of the Financial Market (NSFR) turned to the Ministry of Defense and the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. The head of the organization, Andrei Emelin, said that a similar appeal would be sent to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, since it is it that is responsible for creating a register of those liable for military service. Experts explained to MK how the new norm will work, whether it will only affect draft dodgers or whether their family members will face difficulties.

In April, the State Duma adopted in the third reading amendments to the law “On military duty and service.” He allowed to send subpoenas to citizens in a personal account on the State Services portal. In addition, according to the regulation, the Russians who received the summons will be denied the opportunity to receive loans and will be prohibited from traveling abroad until they appear at the military registration and enlistment office.

The NSFR claims that it was a discovery for banks that they will be involved in the implementation of the provisions of the law “On military duty and service”, and not the relevant regulatory act “On banks and banking activities”. Credit institutions do not understand how they will be given access to the new registries of those liable for military service, as well as how to correctly refuse loans to evaders, because usually clients do not expect to receive a summons and are poorly informed that this may somehow affect the approval of their loans.

The NSFR was asked to provide banks with access to data on the time the summons was sent and the moment when it is considered served. Moreover, this service should be fast: they asked to provide access to information from the registry within a minute and without the consent of the applicant.

The new law has raised many questions about how long loan applications will be considered, what to do if a client is recognized as a defaulter on the day of receiving a loan, how the system for appealing restrictive measures by a client will work and how banks will find out about it, how refinancing or restructuring loans will work dodgers, etc.

As Mikhail Alekseev, an expert of the Popular Front project “For the Rights of Borrowers”, noted, now, if a loan is refused, the bank is not obliged to explain to the potential borrower and to the one who could not become a borrower why the loan was denied. At the same time, bank customers themselves are always invited to request information about the reasons for refusal from credit bureaus.

“Here, the need for banks to have access to the register of information is obvious,” the expert pointed out. “Ultimately, it may turn out that the entire credit market will have wide access to the registry, and this, in turn, may cause certain difficulties and certain risks regarding information leakage.”

Alekseev draws attention to the fact that people can get into the register of so-called “evaders” either by accident or by mistake. This means that the very fact of getting there will be a certain trigger, so it is quite fair that the community of professional lenders is asking for clarification. In the meantime, this whole situation in one way or another “undermines” the desire of banks, in principle, to lend to the male population of the country, the interlocutor of “MK” believes.

So far, no one has made exact calculations about how many dodgers there are in Russia and who this rule of law will potentially affect: there is only approximate information and references from the military department. For example, last year 700,000 Russians went abroad. This was reported by a number of media sources in the Kremlin. However, not all those who left the country were men, and the Ministry of Defense planned to send subpoenas not to all males who left the country. In addition, some of the Russians who left then have already returned, which also complicates the calculations.

“In the country as a whole, the proportion of citizens who evade military service does not exceed 0.1% of the total number of conscripts according to the Ministry of Defense,” says Associate Professor of the Department of State and Municipal Finance of the Russian University of Economics. G. V. Plekhanov Artyom Lyukshin. – In the fall of 2022, a map of Moscow was published with the number of dodgers by district. The total number of evaders at that time in the capital was estimated at 6 thousand people.

Moscow is the largest metropolis in Russia, and in terms of share in other cities, cases of draft evasion are purely mathematically smaller, respectively, the share indicated by the Ministry of Defense looks quite consistent with reality.

The interviewed experts agreed that the new norms of the law would not directly affect the relatives of draft dodgers. “This law applies only to draft dodgers and does not apply to family members,” explained Alexey Gavrishev, a lawyer and managing partner at AVG Legal. However, if we talk about such measures as deprivation of the right to drive a vehicle, a ban on the disposal of property, refusal to receive loans and register as an individual entrepreneur, then family members of the dodger may also indirectly suffer from such measures. In general, banks, citizens, human rights activists, and lawyers have a lot of questions about the new law, so everyone is waiting for further clarifications from regulators and ministries.