Expanded will remain narrow – Newspaper Kommersant No. 197 (7398) of 10/24/2022

The Ministry of Finance proposes to revise plans for the introduction from the beginning of 2023 of extended treasury support (TCS) for all major construction government contracts. The draft resolution prepared by the department preserves the current procedure for introducing this mechanism only by separate decisions of the government. Previously, business associations offered the government to keep the targeted use of RCC, justifying this, among other things, by the risks of rising costs of contractors and the unpreparedness of the market for a new form of control.

The Ministry of Finance has developed a draft government decree providing for the extension of the targeted application of expanded treasury support for government construction contracts. Recall that the RCC mechanism implies enhanced control over their parties. This, in particular, the maintenance of separate accounting of the results of financial and economic activities and additional checks by the treasury of expenditure declarations on the structure of the price of the state contract, as well as the facts of the delivery of goods and the fulfillment of obligations.

Initially, it was planned to extend the effect of the RCC to all construction contracts worth more than 1 billion rubles. since the beginning of this year, but as a result, a full-fledged start was postponed until January 2023 – before that, the RCC is applied only by individual decisions of the government. According to the project of the Ministry of Finance, this procedure is proposed to be extended (the deadline for its validity is not specified). At the same time, from 2023, it is proposed to tighten the rules for the economic justification of costs within the framework of the RCC, in particular, the cost of salaries, taxes and insurance premiums. According to the current rules (the norm has been suspended until the end of the year), these requirements apply to contracts in the amount of 20 billion rubles, but the draft provides for their extension to all construction contracts with RKS.

It should be noted that the government previously asked the business community to maintain the introduction of the RCC only on certain decisions of the government (see Kommersant of September 30). RSPP referred to the need to first test the mechanism, as well as the risks of additional costs due to changes in reporting and the possibility of salary delays due to the need to justify them. In general, the business community initially rather painfully perceived the prospect of introducing the RCS – at the beginning of the year, business warned the government about the unpreparedness of the market, the risks of blocking the activities of contractors and the possible withdrawal from the sphere of state orders for construction organizations (see “Kommersant” dated January 25).

The project published by the Ministry of Finance in the business community is still being commented rather cautiously. As the RSPP explained to Kommersant, “the position of the union will be sent as part of the public discussion until November 4.” The National Association of Infrastructure Companies (NAIK) welcomes the proposal of the Ministry of Finance and says that the arguments of the business have been “heard”. Discussions, according to the RSPP and NAIK, require the issue of extending the rules for the economic justification of costs in the implementation of the RCM to contracts of any value – since there is no such practice yet, it is premature to draw any conclusions, according to representatives of the associations.

According to Dmitry Narinsky, professor at the Higher School of Urban Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, in the context of a budget deficit, tightening the rules for justifying costs is generally logical, but it is advisable to differentiate the amount of contracts for which justification is necessary depending on the type of project. Ilya Ponomarev, an expert of the Public Council under the Ministry of Construction, believes that in engineering activities it is necessary to control the contractor’s competencies, deadlines and results, and not all cost elements. “For example, the controller considers unreasonable the salaries of “branded” welders (certified workers who put their individual code on welded joints.— “b”) – what then to be, you can’t replace it with two ordinary ones, ”he says.

Evgenia Kryuchkova