The budget was painted for two – Newspaper Kommersant No. 66 (7511) dated 04/15/2023

A joint board meeting of two key financial and economic departments, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economy, held on Friday at the White House, recorded the authorities’ transition from an anti-crisis program to support the economy to the implementation of national development goals and to the gradual normalization of the budget process. In this construction, the government is once again counting on private initiative and investment by companies, calling business support one of its priorities. However, the state is not yet ready to offer fundamentally new mechanisms for such support to entrepreneurs. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance intends to tighten control over the effectiveness of already issued benefits, it will also ask more strictly from the regions from which the center requires significant results, and not the mechanical development of allocated funds.

The Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economy held a joint meeting on Friday. Reporting events of these departments have not been held in such a dual format since 2011. At the meeting held in the White House, the parameters of the macro forecast were presented, from which the authorities will proceed when forming the next budget. Already this year, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov noted, the priorities of fiscal policy “are gradually shifting from the anti-crisis agenda to the implementation of national development goals.” Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who participated in the board, recalled the list of priorities to those present. This is technological and financial sovereignty, outpacing the development of transport infrastructure, the growth of citizens’ incomes, the solution of demographic problems, building ties with friendly countries and the search for new partners.

The head of the Ministry of Economy Maxim Reshetnikov announced that in 2023 GDP growth is expected at 1.2% instead of 0.8% in the September version of the forecast. This will be helped by the growth of consumer demand with a decrease in inflation, the absence of indexation of housing and communal services tariffs this year, a good harvest and an increase in real incomes of citizens by 5% at once. Taking into account the decrease in the trade balance, the average exchange rate of the ruble this year is estimated at 76.5 rubles. per dollar, in the future, a gradual weakening of the national currency to 78.8 rubles is expected. in 2026.

The Ministry of Economy proceeds from the assumption that investment growth of 0.5% (against the previously expected decline of 1%) this year will be provided by private initiative.

Recall that in 2022, a 4.6% increase in investments was largely provided by budget investments, which grew by 26% at once. It is planned to stimulate the private sector through the development of support tools, modification of the investment tax deduction (see “Kommersant” dated March 1) and lending support (particularly through the creation of a taxonomy of technological sovereignty projects). The Ministry of Economy proposes to link the VEB.RF guarantee mechanism and such support measures as, for example, a cluster investment platform with its preferential loans at 5.2% (see “Kommersant” dated December 16, 2022). All this, we note, does not solve systemic problems with the state of the business climate and does not remove uncertainty in the markets due to the events of 2022, but the departments are unlikely to be able to significantly influence these factors.

In the case of the Ministry of Finance, business support comes down to a comfortable interaction between revenue administrators and entrepreneurs.

The Ministry of Finance intends to improve the system of revenue administration, in other words, to tighten tax control.

The mechanism of tax monitoring is supposed to be extended to medium-sized companies. To this end, the thresholds for its application will be reduced threefold: for annual turnover and assets – from 3 billion to 1 billion rubles, for the amount of taxes paid – from 300 million to 100 million rubles. Thus, monitoring will be able to cover up to 450 companies in 18 industries that provide a third of budget revenues. It is likely that the expansion will primarily affect medium-sized industrial enterprises in the regions – it is on them that state support is now concentrated within the framework of import substitution programs.

The transition from the anti-crisis agenda to the normalization of the budget policy involves tightening control over budget money. Anton Siluanov on Friday urged the governors to focus not on the development of funds received from the center, but on achieving economically significant results – on creating jobs, increasing GRP and increasing tax potential.

In 2023, individual methods for evaluating the effectiveness of business benefits should be prepared – based on the results, the parameters of preferential regimes will be adjusted. In parallel, the Ministry of Finance is unifying the rules for granting subsidies to producers: all interaction between the state and recipients will take place electronically. So the department expects to eliminate bureaucratic delays, reduce costs and comprehend the results of the allocation of this money.

In general, the board demonstrated the Ministry of Finance’s unpreparedness to increase spending after their rapid growth in 2022.

The agency intends to introduce “elements of zero budgeting into the budget process” – to abandon obsolete tasks and irrelevant spending and reorient them towards spending to achieve national goals.

It is expected that digitalization opportunities will allow the Ministry of Finance to optimize the costs of government agencies. We are talking about a unified information environment for budgetary accounting of state institutions with seamless interaction of information systems. This, among other things, allows you to abandon most of the financial statements. Earlier, the department had already transferred all 50 government bodies to centralized accounting, which allowed the budget to save on administrative costs (400,000 people now receive salaries through the treasury function). It is expected that this practice will also be extended to budgetary institutions and the subjects of the Russian Federation.

Diana Galieva, Evgenia Kryuchkova