Cheaper for yourself

The volume of paid government services to the population and companies will be reduced by a third

As part of the administrative reform, the government does not give up hope of introducing into a unified framework the practice of providing public services to the population and companies . The White House cannot accept the fact that government agencies, in addition to the regularly collected duties and fines prescribed in the Tax Code, can, at their discretion, charge money for certain services. These fees, which are a breeding ground for corruption, are determined by departmental instructions; such amateur activities are not regulated in any way by law. At the same time, the annual volume of paid government services, according to the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, at the federal level alone is estimated at 1.5 trillion rubles.

Last Friday, Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Staff of the Government Sergei Naryshkin said that the Cabinet of Ministers plans to reduce the list of paid government services by a third. According to him, measures to optimize them were approved on the same day at a meeting of the government commission for administrative reform.

In September, amendments are expected to be made to the Tax Code to include a list of paid government services in this document. For those services that are not included in the list, government agencies will be prohibited from charging fees. Now, according to the Deputy Prime Minister, “work is being completed to optimize the list of state-important services provided on a paid basis. The list will only include those services for which charging a fee has a legal basis,” Mr. Naryshkin emphasized.

Meanwhile, skeptics doubt that officials will quickly surrender to the mercy of the list of paid government services. It has long been known that the ingenuity of many of them in using their official position for personal gain knows no bounds. One way is to charge money for super-accelerating the process of issuing documents or for service out of turn.

There are also fears that once the list of government services comes into force (previously government officials said this could happen on January 1, 2008), the price of some of them will rise significantly. “Paid services should not be burdensome for citizens, but at the same time justified from the point of view of expediency,” said, for example, at the March conference “Administrative Reform: Results and Prospects,” Andrei Sharov, director of the department of state regulation in the economy of the Ministry of Economic Development. He did not hide the fact that some services provided to legal entities may become more expensive. For example, the fee for considering an application for the acquisition or sale of assets, which is submitted to the Federal Antimonopoly Service, may increase. Now it is 10 thousand rubles, but officials propose, in accordance with international experience, to set a percentage of the transaction amount as a fee for such a public service.

In addition, on Friday the administrative reform commission approved a draft regulation on multifunctional centers for the provision of state and municipal services. Government services in these centers will be provided on a “one-window” principle, which, as experience accumulated in a number of regions shows, allows citizens not only to significantly reduce the time it takes to obtain various certificates and documents, but also to save nerves. According to Mr. Naryshkin, 19 such centers should be created this year, including in the Lipetsk, Tula and Omsk regions. In the next three years, as Mr. Naryshkin said during an April trip to Kazan for a meeting of the State Council, it is planned to create at least one hundred multifunctional centers in Russia. Then Deputy Prime Minister Naryshkin called them a kind of “supermarket” of government services, where if there is a queue, it is electronic, and payment for services is fixed.

Mikhail VOROBYEV