The review revealed an oversight – Newspaper Kommersant No. 17 (7462) of 01/31/2023

The Accounts Chamber, after checking the work of the Federal Property Management Agency in Moscow, stated inefficient and non-transparent management of state property. The audit showed that long-standing problems have not been resolved: the state does not have reliable data on the assets it owns, which is why the budget receives less revenue. The Federal Property Management Agency does not agree with the criticism of state auditors: comparing different databases is often incorrect, and inconsistencies in 2022 have already been eliminated. The problems of managing state assets in Moscow, however, are also explained by the specifics of the market – in the capital it is necessary to maintain a pool of real estate for the needs of government agencies.

The Accounts Chamber recognized the work of the territorial department of the Federal Property Management Agency in Moscow in 2020-2021 as inefficient. Recall that in 2020, the Accounts Chamber also stated systemic problems in this area – from gaps in regulation to the lack of reliable information about state property and inefficient management of it. The report, signed by the auditor Andrey Baturkin, indicates that most of the problems persist. State auditors note that the Moscow Department did not conduct an inventory of state assets and did not comply with accounting rules, which is why there is no object-by-object accounting of state property, and the cost of non-financial state assets is different in different information systems.

The main claim of the auditors comes down to the lack of reliable data in the federal property register (RFI) – about the area and cost, cadastral registration, restrictions and encumbrances of state-owned real estate. This information does not match the data of the Unified State Register of Real Estate (EGRN). According to the joint venture, management does not sufficiently involve real estate in circulation and poorly controls its use. As a result of mismanagement, the federal budget receives less revenue.

“All criteria for the effectiveness of management activities are either negative due to identified violations and shortcomings, or cannot be determined due to the lack of relevant data,” the auditor’s report notes. The document recommends that the Ministry of Finance update the data of the RFI and compare them with the data of other information systems, as well as place in the public domain data on objects available for involvement in economic turnover. The Ministry of Finance, which in recent years has consolidated the powers to manage state property – the Federal Property Management Agency is subordinate to it – did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

In the Federal Property Management Agency itself, they do not agree with the criticism of state auditors, pointing to the specifics of work in Moscow: since all federal government agencies are concentrated in the city, not all objects can be involved in economic turnover. “The additional need for placement of federal executive authorities in the city of Moscow today is more than 30 thousand square meters. m. Therefore, the privatization plan includes only objects that are not in demand by federal structures,” said Vadim Yakovenko, head of the agency. The department fulfills the planned indicators: income from the lease of land and real estate is estimated at 11.1 billion rubles. in 2020–2022, 190 new lease agreements were concluded with an additional income of 900 million rubles, 40 objects were sold for 1.1 billion rubles.

The problems of data inconsistency are also gradually being eliminated: for example, duplicate and unreliable data were excluded from the register by the time the audit of the Accounts Chamber was completed, and the decision to switch to property-by-object accounting was made in 2020. For more than 500 thousand objects, the Federal Property Management Agency and the Federal Treasury (FC) are already working on such accounting: in 2021, technical means of data integration were developed and the primary synchronization of registry information into the accounting system of the Federal Treasury was carried out. “The discrepancies based on the results of reconciliation of data from the RFI and budget accounting data for Moscow have been eliminated and are absent at the end of 2022,” Kommersant was told at the Federal Property Management Agency. However, corrections are made to the data when discovered and are not reflected in the historical documents that the SP examines.

The problems of inefficient management of state assets are largely explained by the lack of resources to solve them, both financial and personnel. Until recently, data on state assets was collected manually, while many objects were either not delimited, not formalized, or the documents for them were lost. Now the departments are working on the digitalization of accounting processes, however, the work may be complicated by the unsettled status of ownership – given the investment attractiveness and cost of objects, this issue is especially sensitive for Moscow.

Diana Galieva