Ministry of Economy expands experiment on digital support for small and medium-sized businesses

The White House is expanding its experiment in digital support for small and medium-sized businesses – targeted and proactive selection of benefits based on the digital profile of an entrepreneur. The profile will be supplemented with data from a dozen information systems and will be integrated with the Electronic Budget system for applying for subsidies. The development of the digital platform and the expansion of the profile are explained by the transition of the government to a concept in which the state is better than the business itself, knows about its needs and thereby increases the effectiveness of state support. The approach is relevant in the context of the budget deficit and the curtailment of massive assistance to the sector.

The Ministry of Economy proposed to expand the experiment on the digital transformation of the system for providing support to small and medium-sized businesses, follows from the draft government decree published on regulation.gov.ru. The government came up with ideas for digitalizing interactions with SMEs in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic. The authorities then learned how to quickly adjust support measures to the needs of business and came to the conclusion that entrepreneurs themselves are not able to identify support priorities in the long term, but the state can – thanks to data arrays. Thus, in February 2022, a digital SME platform was launched in experimental mode, which should provide a targeted and proactive approach to support based on the digital profile of an entrepreneur. The profile itself was launched in December 2022: if it used 800 different types of data, then in May 2023 – already 1.2 thousand, including information from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and the EGRIP, the SME register, tax returns and databases, about bank accounts and receiving support measures, Kommersant was told at the SME Corporation.

The draft resolution extends the experiment until April 2031 (assessment of intermediate results in April 2025) and expands its parameters. This includes the possibility for businesses to apply for subsidies. To do this, it is proposed to integrate the profile of an entrepreneur with the Electronic Budget system, and the Ministry of Finance, which throughout the year unifies the process of distributing budget subsidies among legal entities and individuals (see Kommersant of May 24 and June 14).

The number of participants in the experiment will also include other departments that provide information necessary for the selection of support measures. One of the “key” ones will be the Federal Tax Service, which will replenish the platform with information from tax returns and constituent documents of the organization, as well as data on the number of employees. The platform will be linked to all industry GIS: the profile will contain information from the Ministry of Digital Development (information on the accreditation of IT companies and licenses), the Treasury (on unscrupulous suppliers and debts to budgets and bailiffs), the Ministry of Industry and Trade (on manufactured industrial products), the Ministry of Economy (from the Unified Register of End Recipients of State Support for Innovation Activities), the Ministry of Internal Affairs (on vehicles) and Rospatent (on rights to the results of intellectual activity).

Alexander Isaevich, General Director of the SME Corporation, explains that the expansion of the profile is necessary for two purposes. “The first is for the platform to improve the automatic selection of suitable measures that are already available to the entrepreneur or can be obtained by eliminating the restrictions provided for by regulatory enactments. Now the problem lies precisely in the fact that the business does not know about these restrictions: it may have a debt of literally three kopecks. But it is they who do not allow him to receive support. The second goal is to improve the process of automatically completing the questionnaire / application form when applying for support, ”he explains.

The process of automating support for SMEs is accelerating amid falling budget revenues: the government has already announced the abandonment of massive support for the sector in favor of promising enterprises (see Kommersant on June 15 and 16). Digitalization will provide the state with data on its effectiveness and will directly affect the process of distributing benefits among SMEs and abandoning non-working tools.

Diana Galieva, Kristina Borovikova