With the world on a string, a new department – Newspaper Kommersant No. 167 (7368) of 09/12/2022

Some technical changes in the regulations of the state apparatus draw attention only to the fact that they have not been made before, and the “naturalness” of the solution usually hides the multi-layered and complex nature of the problem that is being solved in this way. An example of such a situation is the summer rule-making around the register of agreements between authorities at different levels. On August 22, the government approved the rules for the Ministry of Justice to maintain a register of agreements relating to the transfer of various powers to each other, and last week the Ministry of Justice itself published a draft decree, according to which its powers will include maintaining such a register.

Recall what we are talking about. From the very beginning of the 1990s, the executive power in the Russian Federation at two levels (federal and regional) signed agreements on the transfer of certain powers to each other, mainly from the federal to the regional level, rarely vice versa. This process was quite complicated, in the early stages it often had the character of “plugging holes” due to the collapse of Soviet institutions, later it reflected the competition of two levels of power for powers, then it looked like a struggle between tradition and unification, in recent years this was superimposed by the work of the Ministry of Finance on streamlining budgetary relations. It is even difficult to estimate how many such contracts we are talking about in the end – apparently, their corpus consists of hundreds, perhaps several thousand documents.

Of course, it is surprising that a digital registry for such agreements will appear in the Russian Federation only from 2023 – this is not some kind of complex and heavy database, and it would seem that since 1999 it is almost impossible to imagine the work of the state apparatus without such a database. Nevertheless, it still does not exist: in fact, the state apparatus in the Russian Federation, for all its technocratic nature and desire to regulate everything that moves, is not so big that this work has been done earlier. Meanwhile, it is clearly necessary: ​​over the decades of the existence of a system of such contracts “on paper”, Russian companies (starting from medium-sized ones), involved, for example, in PPP projects, concessions, etc., have created entire departments at the intersection of jurisprudence and GRs, busy figuring out how this system works, should and can work, without this it is impossible to consider the risks of regional business expansion.

The fact that at least an increase in employment in it after the creation of the register of the Ministry of Justice can be avoided is good news, not bad news, the bad news is that no one will ever return the already incurred corporate costs of three decades on this account to anyone, while they were paid by you : the costs of a lawyer who finds out what in a particular case in Russia is regulated by the federal ministry, and what is regional, are included in the cost of any product or service. And there is no way to know how much all these things cost in total, but hardly insignificantly little.