Report by Andrey Kolesnikov about the meeting of the head of the Federal Tax Service Daniil Egorov with Vladimir Putin

November 21 Russian President Vladimir Putin Meets with the head of the Federal Tax Service (FTS) of the Russian Federation Daniil Egorov, who, according to a special correspondent for Kommersant Andrey Kolesnikov, I told it like it is, and it turned out to be a lot.

— Daniil Vyacheslavovich, what are our forecasts? Under 46 trillion (rubles of tax revenues.— “Kommersant”) should come out, right? – Mr. Putin asked to start the conversation.

When a conversation starts with such numbers, it shouldn’t be boring (but it happens).

“Yes, absolutely right, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” confirmed Mr. Egorov.

– Will it work? — the president suddenly began to doubt.

But, apparently, this was the direct script of the conversation.

“We plan that yes,” confirmed the head of the Federal Tax Service. “There is every reason for this, because if we talk about what we see based on the results of ten months, then we have already reached 37.6 trillion. This is a plus, essentially, 3.6 trillion rubles. to last year.

Why treasury revenues are increasing more and more, as well as the country’s GDP, and above all more than forecasts, is a big and largely inexplicable mystery.

Of course, everything at once causes distrust, but the risk of saying all this is obvious, knowing that nothing can be erased. Or maybe this doesn’t bother anyone at all anymore.

— That is, if everything works out as we say, it will be about 6% more for the year as a whole than in 2022?

“Even, I would say, nine,” noted Daniil Egorov.

That is, not everything works out as they said.

– At nine?! – asked the president, who was listening to his colleague extremely tensely and even, it seemed, anxiously.

“Yes, by 9%,” consider Mr. Egorov shrugging his shoulders. “Because we had 42 trillion rubles that year.” for the year – the total budget, and this year, accordingly, it will be 46. That is, we will have 4 trillion plus.

It was clear.

— Are non-oil and gas revenues also higher than last year? – asked Vladimir Putin, knowing, without a doubt, the answer, which was winning, otherwise why would he ask. – In the structure, I mean (and where else.- A.K.)…

— You know, Vladimir Vladimirovich (yes, he knew.— A.K.), they will, in principle, form our main income. Non-oil and gas revenues will account for 3.2 trillion in growth,” nodded the head of the Federal Tax Service.

– This is good. “You also wanted to talk about the automation of some processes,” Mr. Putin suggested, so that there would be no hitch in such a good conversation.

– Yes, absolutely right! – Mr. Egorov caught himself.

– Please!

— I would like to note that this growth occurs against the background of two processes! – continued Daniil Egorov. – I think it is important to say that this year we have half as many inspections as last year. Last year there were 8 thousand inspections by this time, this year there were 4 thousand inspections. This is the first.

– Twice less?.. – Mr. Putin did not seem to know this.

Or maybe I forgot.

– Twice smaller! – confirmed Daniil Egorov.

— Is this precisely due to this automation? – the president understood.

— Due to automation in general, including through risk analysis and automation of control procedures that we implement in the service. This concerns checks,” said Daniil Egorov, who overcame my natural distrust of people before my eyes. “Second. This year saw one of the most serious tax reforms in terms of payments. We have a completely new payment system. The reform can be considered completed: now each taxpayer essentially has one tax account; he does not need to distribute money among the country’s budgets. He pays into one account, and we automatically, together with the Treasury, deal with this splitting.

Everything here was to the point. Finally, sitting in front of the president was a man who actually had something to say.

– What did this lead to? – Mr. Egorov added. – First. If we talk about what happened that year, we had approximately 670 billion rubles of outstanding payments, this year – 28.

— Unexplained payments? – the president asked again.

One could understand him: firstly, he wanted to find out, and secondly, he had a presentiment that the story would be life-affirming.

And Daniil Egorov readily explained:

— Yes, when people make mistakes in payments, because they need to get into all, let’s say, cells of the budget system, and there are a lot of them, and because of this there were constant errors. Now there are 28 billion left, which is 24 times less. This is the first. Second. Because of this, minus credits – that’s it, we no longer have a credit system! 33 million offsets, which accountants together with us had to understand and look for these payments, no longer exist. Moreover, among legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, we entered this year with the number of technical, so to speak, debtors – 1.9 million. Now 900 thousand remain. That is, when you have an overpayment in one budget and an arrear in another, you are, in fact, a technical debtor. And this is not just a debtor! This means you have the risk of blocking your account and penalties are charged to this budget. That year, 5 billion of such penalties were accrued, respectively, this year – zero. That’s it, people don’t have to pay such a technical penalty anymore!

And most importantly, everything was clear. Including Mr. Putin.

It seemed to me that he was looking at the head of the Federal Tax Service with some kind of fatherly love.

“In addition,” he continued, “we worked closely with our fellow governors and developed a new information system.” That is, we created a new data supply platform completely from scratch, not only, by the way, for governors, but also for federal authorities. There are more than 215 types of information that give an overall picture of the region’s economy. And they also loaded data on the status of payments into the budget there, so that colleagues could see what was being received, what was being accrued, and how to plan their budgets. Now this is done online on a daily basis, and people see their entire data.

Either you know how to report, or something is actually being done in your department. Perhaps this was the second case after all.

“And the last thing, it seems to me, is also an important thing,” said Mr. Egorov. “In addition to the fact that we now have completely open data on payments to budgets in all personal accounts, and this is more than 55 million personal accounts, we automatically issue all the necessary certificates for participation in tender procedures and so on… And people see their data already working in their accounting systems, which we also consider a very serious innovation that came along with this reform.

“That is, not only is this much more convenient for all participants in this process: both for the state and mainly for taxpayers,” the president explained to the head of the Federal Tax Service, “it also leads to an increase in collections!”

– Absolutely right! – confirmed Daniil Egorov. – Now the system has become much more transparent than what we had in previous years of work.

“Excellent,” Mr. Putin nodded.

I can’t remember who he gave this assessment to and when.