Translated material
Folklore audit
Khabarovsk City Hall hired free financial consultants
Starting this year, all financial decisions of the Khabarovsk city authorities will undergo mandatory “public examination.” According to Khabarovsk vice-mayor Valery Kazachenko, the idea of creating a commission of so-called people's auditors belongs to mayor Alexander Sokolov. But the people's auditors will still be professionals.Khabarovsk is one of the first Russian cities to develop a special program for reforming municipal financial systems. Now, any decision of city deputies that in one way or another relates to the budget, any order or order of the mayor’s office related to the distribution of cash flows, before it comes into force, will have to go through a coordination procedure with independent experts.
As Mr. Kazachenko explained, the need for such financial control measures is dictated by the fact that “it is becoming increasingly difficult for the city administration itself to control the correct distribution and direction of financial flows within the city district.”
The first Khabarovsk expert council consists of nine people. None of them had ever been involved in municipal service. This is one of the main criteria for the independence of experts. But at the same time, they are all professionals in their field, noted Tatyana Titova, head of the budget department of Khabarovsk. Four doctors of economic sciences, an auditor, a lawyer and just an excellent student in the financial service have already begun to fulfill their duties. People's auditors will understand the intricacies of the municipality's financial policy exclusively on a voluntary basis, that is, for free.
In the person of the expert commission, the Khabarovsk mayor's office, in fact, received the opportunity to receive free advice on financial issues. The chairman of the newly-minted expert council, Alexander Karpenko, who is also a lawyer at the Khabarovsk Regional Dental Association, is confident that the experts are as representative as possible of the various groups of the city’s population. And although all of them were invited to this council directly by city administration officials, according to Mr. Karpenko, “the voluntary controllers have enough strength and will to be able to defend the financial interests of the citizens and ensure that the city authorities implement expert recommendations.”
At the very first meeting of the expert council, the vice-mayor of Khabarovsk Valery Kazachenko said that the commission’s opinion for the city authorities was purely advisory in nature. Nevertheless, any conclusion of financial experts will be taken into account when making any decisions at all levels of municipal government, the official assured.
One of the pressing issues for the Khabarovsk budget, which the mayor’s office hopes will be resolved through the mediation of an independent expert review, may be the taxation of the local airport. Last year, when forming the current budget, deputies of the Khabarovsk City Duma by a majority vote exempted this institution from paying part of the land tax. The decision was dictated by the hope that reducing the tax burden would have a beneficial effect on the cost of air tickets for residents of the regional center. In fact, air transportation tariffs continue to rise, and the already deficit budget of Khabarovsk was shortfall by more than 30 million rubles this year.
The authors of the financial experiment hope that through the mediation of an independent financial examination, city authorities this year will be able to avoid making rash and simply erroneous decisions.