| Officials are looking for those responsible for the alcohol crisis The order to find those responsible for the crisis in the alcohol market, which was given recently by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, caused a response in the Ministry of Finance. Alexei Kudrin’s department, according to a note published on the government’s official website on Friday, was the main “suspect” that the new system could not work. He was presented with a complaint that the documents required for the introduction of the Unified State Automated Information System for Accounting for Alcohol, Alcohol and Alcohol-Containing Products (USAIS) were submitted to the government with a significant delay. At the same time, the guilt of the FSUE Scientific and Technical Center Atlas, subordinate to the Federal Security Service, which became the developer of the Unified State Automated Information System, is formulated in a florid manner - the enterprise connected market participants to the system only in the last two weeks before the start of its operation, and only because the companies expected postponing the date of entry into force of the new procedure. Considering the conflictual relationship between the White House and the Ministry of Finance, such emphasis in the document is not surprising.
An anonymous Finance Ministry official told news agency correspondents yesterday that the source of the problems is not at all in Ilyinka. “The main defect of the entire system is the Unified State Automated Information System and its technical capabilities,” Interfax quotes a representative of the Ministry of Finance. The official said that the Ministry of Finance calls for urgent improvements to the EGAIS software to eliminate failures in the system. In this regard, Ilyinka believes that proposals to resolve the crisis in the alcohol industry should be expected not so much from the Ministry of Finance, but from the developers of the Unified State Automated Information System, that is, from the Atlas Scientific and Technical Center.
In response to complaints against the Ministry of Finance, the official said that the deadlines for submitting documents necessary for issuing new stamps and implementing the Unified State Automated Information System were violated due to complex coordination with other departments, in particular with the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Agriculture. So, according to him, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade did not agree on the price of the stamp for a long time, since the Ministry of Finance believed that the stamp should cost 1.35 rubles, and the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade insisted on 1.3 rubles. The official also recalled that amendments regarding the introduction of a new type of federal special and excise stamps were introduced by law on December 31, 2005, and only after that the Ministry of Finance was able to begin preparing the necessary documents. In addition, Interfax quotes the official as saying, “the government had nothing to do with the amendments introducing the Unified State Automated Information System,” since they were introduced by Duma deputies. As a result, “no money is provided in the budget for the implementation of these amendments.” And the Atlas Scientific and Technical Center, which is implementing the system entirely at its own expense, according to the official, demanded 5% of the cost of stamps issued in 2006 for the development of EGAIS software. According to the Ministry of Finance, this year it is planned to issue stamps worth approximately 5 billion rubles.
The Ministry of Finance also has other complaints against government colleagues and legislators. Thus, according to the agency’s interlocutor, at the insistence of the Ministry of Finance, a transition period was introduced from January 1 to June 30, when alcoholic beverages with both old and new brands were in legal circulation, but at the same time, deputies refused to include in the 2006 budget law years, amendments proposed by the Ministry of Finance, which provided for a one-year delay in connecting to the Unified State Automated Information System and the introduction of new excise stamps for imported alcohol. In addition, according to a representative of the Ministry of Finance, the plan developed by the Ministry of Agriculture for the implementation of the law providing for the implementation of the Unified State Automated Information System was not agreed upon with the ministry.
Now, a Ministry of Finance official believes, the situation can only be corrected by postponing the introduction of the system in automatic mode to debug it. “Either it is necessary to postpone the introduction of the system in automatic mode, or it must work in test mode until the software and legislative failures are corrected,” Reuters quotes the official. He added that “at a meeting with Zhukov (Mikhail Fradkov instructed Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov to understand the situation - Ed. ), the de facto automated EGAIS system was recognized as incompetent.”
According to the government, as of June 11, EGAIS was installed in 2,490 organizations, in particular 481 alcohol producers (more than 97% of organizations planning to connect to EGAIS), 83 importers (78%), 1,825 wholesalers (77%) and 56 producers of ethyl alcohol (more than 57%). The government's materials also note that the Federal Antimonopoly Service must, by August 18, check the validity of Atlas' tariffs for connecting to the Unified State Automated Information System and maintaining software.
The Federal Customs Service reported yesterday that as of July 24, the Goznak association had produced 299 million excise stamps. Importers were issued 115.2 million stamps, bar codes were applied to 75.1 million stamps, and more than 20 million units of alcoholic beverages marked with new excise stamps were imported into the country, the Federal Customs Service noted in a press release. The service assured that customs authorities are fully provided with the excise stamps necessary for issuance to importers. Ivan GORDEEV |
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