Experts explained what dangers are fraught with a single payment for housing and communal services

Pitfalls of the proposal of the Ministry of Construction: “Technical failures are inevitable”

From year to year, the authorities are trying to make the housing and communal services system in Russia more transparent. This time, the Ministry of Construction proposed the introduction of “single payment documents using individual and common household metering devices for communal resources.” The idea is that all payment documents throughout the country are exposed through the state information system of housing and communal services (GIS housing and communal services). The department believes that this will help consumers: it will become clear where this or that amount came from. Meanwhile, experts doubt the need for such modernization. It is dangerous to store such a large amount of data on one platform: no one is immune from technical failures.

Today, there are many options for how to set payments to tenants. If the managing organization does not use the services of a single settlement center, it itself issues a payment document in the approved form, which displays all the services rendered. There is another option, when managing organizations or resource providers provide information to the settlement center, which combines all the received data and sends them to consumers in the form of a payment document. Now the Ministry of Construction has proposed to combine all the data on the federal site of the GIS housing and communal services.

Of course, from the point of view of the consumer, this is more convenient: the fewer payments come in, the easier it is to navigate, says Pavel Sigal, First Vice President of Opora Rossii. “We received one document and immediately paid for it,” he continues. – This clearly shows how much the consumer owes the state. When forming a single payment document, it is quite possible that it will be easier for government agencies to administer utility bills and see how much is generally paid for the entire range of housing and communal services, and draw certain conclusions from this.

Pavel Sklyanchuk, an expert of the People’s Front, a member of the Public Council of the federal project “School of a Literate Consumer”, emphasizes that receipts are not just a bill for electricity and heat, but valuable information about the needs of citizens and the volume of consumption of communal resources. These data can form the basis, for example, for the formation of social tariffs. In addition, in its current form, receipts are written for accounting, not for people. Small print, abbreviations, and other uninformative data.

“Not only are people dissatisfied with the amounts, they also do not understand what they are paying for,” continues the source of MK. — Today, the regions are developing a model of settlement centers that act as payment agents. But the infrastructure of the GIS housing and communal services allows you to accumulate payments and set them electronically in the user’s personal account. It’s convenient and should be free. Therefore, the Ministry of Construction, speaking of single payments, continues the digital transformation of the housing and communal services sector.”

In fact, the proposal of the Ministry of Construction is only to make the GIS housing and communal services a place for general collection of data from service providers from all over the country, explains Irina Gentsler, director of the Urban Economy direction of the Institute for Urban Economics Foundation. Already on this site, a receipt will be generated in electronic form

“On the one hand, the very desire to make the GIS housing and communal services a data collection center is a kind of desire for gigantomania. In fact, the problems associated with payments are very local. The number technically raises the question: why should there be one all-Russian platform? It’s a crazy flow of information. For this data, people from all over the country will come every month on the same dates. The larger the system, the more likely it is to fail. Meanwhile, now there are local services that local residents are already accustomed to. The question requires serious justification, ”the expert concludes.