Oleg Sapozhkov’s column about the evolution of the state machine without public attention

The growth of government involvement in economic life in recent years makes us increasingly watch what is happening in the White House. The sequence of reforms that the government put itself through during this time quite significantly changed the very mechanisms of work of the executive branch – and even through the tightening of the closed nature of administrative life, which is quite explainable during wartime and sanctions, it is noticeable how stratified public and substantive politics have become. Work “for TV” is increasingly covering up meaningful processes, but this does not mean that they do not exist—it’s just that important changes in the life of the Belodomov corporation, as Kommersant assumed several years ago, are increasingly assessed from within as interesting only to itself and there is no need for “external” discussions, although the discussion, as a rule, is about regulating the flow of public and private money and power formally delegated to the government by society.

To justify this approach, Kommersant’s interlocutors in the government apparatus often talk about the professionalization and digitalization of regulation and the impossibility of meaningfully discussing them outside a narrow circle of professionals (“and we already have them all here”). At the same time, we must pay tribute to this professionalization: often innovations actually immediately include feedback mechanisms with regulated industries and the possibility of adjustment “if something goes wrong” – although how much of this is enough and how much it is possible to “correct” large system decisions is a question open.

Formally, in the coming years, only the nuances of the “adaptation” and “sovereignization” of the Russian economy will depend on the internal decisions of the White House, which is directly confirmed by the ideologists of the new power structure, which, obviously, reduces the degree of public interest in what is happening: if the decision is that the life of the average person in the coming years will be worse and more expensive, it is already predetermined – the question of how much worse and how much more expensive becomes, at best, a cry about the hair on a removed head. However, our task is to methodically study what is happening, regardless of how ready the public is to discuss important changes. The function of the newspaper to answer the question – “where did it all come from, how did it work and what follows from it” – has not been canceled.

One of the last White House decisions that went almost unnoticed in the public sphere – signed on November 30 resolution, which introduced a new tool for coordinating operational amendments to the budget schedule – a mechanism very intensively used by the government since the pandemic to adapt to changes in the economy. According to the Ministry of Finance, where the innovation is called reengineering of budget business processes, now all its “adaptation” edits will occur in a single request mode according to a standard scheme – which should increase the speed and coherence of making such decisions (and here it does not matter what the adaptation is for, for the plague , pestilence, cholera or the discovery of a deposit of US dollars in Russia).

The innovation will affect not only the limits of budget obligations (how much money ministries and departments can spend), but also the exchange of information “about capital investment objects and real estate objects.”

“This will be implemented through the introduction of a single application, the terms of formation, coordination and approval of which are clearly regulated and do not exceed 25 working days,” the Ministry of Finance explained to Kommersant, clarifying that the document unifies and introduces a unified procedure for making decisions on editing budget expenditures “on all grounds, including the grounds for the redistribution of budgetary allocations within the framework of state programs within 10% (this volume does not require amendments to the budget law.— “Kommersant”) and for capital investments.”

The essence of the innovation is that on the basis of a single request, “the remaining documents are automatically generated, and within the framework of a single application, approval occurs once” – for this purpose, “a single application contains information on the indicators and results of state programs and national projects, which allows for decision-making take into account the impact of changes in the volume of financial support on the corresponding indicators and results.” To put it even more simply, the consequences for government colleagues of the interdepartmental, inter-project and inter-program “redistribution” of money “on the fly” at the time of decision-making are calculated by the Ministry of Finance servers, commented on by interested participants and found acceptable – or not, without the petitioner’s endless torment, as before .

This resolution in itself is a typical example of changing the rules of the game, which are difficult to evaluate without context: well, editing, well, budget planning. However, if we remember the previous stages – the “Covid” redrawing of the 2020 budget for specific new tasks, the finalization of the electronic budget outline, the launch of a treasury payment system that performs public sector payments “on the fly”, like some kind of government electronic wallet, the reduction of departmental accounting departments as unnecessary, automation of information exchange of the State Automated System “Management” and departmental information systems – the scale of what is happening turns out to be not at all routine, and the final decision is the de facto cherry on the cake, crowning the many-year process of ridding the White House of internal conflicts due to the “sharing of resources.”

Personally, I was surprised by the transformation of the common metaphor of the “machine of state” into a literal machine, for example, by the ability of the mechanism built in the White House to work in conditions of incomplete information and connections with “adjacent” structures – judicial, political and financial authorities.

It’s no secret to anyone in the state apparatus: the federal executive power has been digitized almost completely, and, for example, governors, despite all the reforms of the political structure of the Russian Federation, still retain a fair amount of autonomy in economic matters, and even regional IT systems are written wherever they happen, but no This does not cause information paralysis.

Almost without discussion, this machine absorbs all the new data necessary in the logic of its development – as happened with EBS, a unified biometric system. To a direct question: how did it happen that this base, collected by banks for their own needs (and not a base, but a whole set of bases), ended up in the hands of the government, who authorized it to do this and how was this decision made? – none of those with whom I spoke from the moment this decision appeared in the public field answered me, although I heard an explanation of why this happened. In short, private owners of biometric data compromised the very idea, did not ensure security, allowed leaks – and the state “had no choice” but to “take it for itself”: the state has imperfect, but still standards, uniform security rules – and even if leaks occur in the future, they will affect everyone, and no one will be left offended. Equal risks for everyone, “through thick and thin,” one of my interlocutors quipped.

The EDS is only the beginning: the National Data Management System (NDMS), discussed since the mid-2010s, is also approaching a similar solution – having failed to find a compromise with business in two decades on the issue of who owns what data, the state has actually leaned toward , that this is his data, whoever its source, subject and collector may be.

There is only one reassurance: the more bases and the deeper the required detail, the more expensive the search – until a new technological breakthrough occurs in this area. No one will compare a bank card number, a diagnosis from an electronic medical record and the balance of a discount card from a pet store in order to find out which citizen washes himself with horse shampoo – why? However, when the government, in conditions of exchange rate instability, needed to check how things really stood with the foreign exchange earnings of the largest exporters, and it turned out that neither the Central Bank, nor Rosfinmonitoring, nor the Ministry of Finance, nor the Federal Tax Service knew this, a “mosaic” was immediately launched. collection of indirect information at the intersections of existing bases, the detail of direct data on which exporters are required to report has been expanded, and the amount of currency necessary to stabilize the exchange rate has been found.

Yes, interlocutors in the White House familiar with the topic admit: the data is incomplete, contradictory and, due to problems with global tax information exchange, will not be complete and consistent until the normalization of relations between the Russian Federation and the whole world (a jurisdiction isolated from the world simply does not have the authority to receive information about company accounts their residents in foreign banks, unless the residents themselves or their counterparties tell about it).

But there is executive discipline in the accounting departments of companies that submit reports to the Ministry of Finance, there are intersections of Bank of Russia data on payments from law-abiding companies to illegal ones, there is a lot of things – and the money has been found.

Yes, not all of them – and this is a problem, but apparently not the main one: was it for this reason that exporters were allowed to create a network of foreign trading companies outside the Russian Federation wherever possible, in order to build new counter-sanctions logistics, and then tear it apart in search of currency. No, of course, the machine turned out to be capable of compromise and successfully implements it – although not everyone still believes that this machine exists.

In contrast, apparently, to society, which does not seem to exist, or at least is not at all interested in the growing digital wall between itself and the state with its own logic of development – and if it is interested, then at such a caricatured level that, except for those who were burning in the cell tower pandemic and the wave of meaningless withdrawals of consent to the use of personal data on State Services – and there’s nothing to remember.