Translated material
Reasonable EGAISm
The fate of the state alcohol control system will have to be decided by the new president and government
The crisis in the alcohol market is postponed indefinitely. Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov signed two resolutions yesterday that radically change the rules of control on the alcohol market. From November 1 of this year to November 1, 2008, the introduction of the Unified State Automated Information System for Alcohol Accounting (USAIS) into automatic mode has been postponed. By another decree of the prime minister, the government submitted to the State Duma amendments to the law on state regulation of alcoholic products, completely removing the wholesale trade system from the scope of the system.In accordance with the bill, wholesalers will be relieved of the obligation to confirm the supply of goods from the wholesale to the retail level in the Unified State Automated Information System from January 1, 2008. Unified State Information System for manufacturers and importers at the first stage was introduced on January 1, 2006, for wholesalers - from July 1, 2006. It was the wholesale link that experienced the greatest problems with its introduction, since it had to work with several hundred types of products.
Decisions to extend the operation of the Unified State Automated Information System in a semi-automatic mode have been made more than once or twice since the system began operating. The fact is that readings from so-called alcohol meters (special means for measuring the concentration and volume of anhydrous alcohol in finished products) installed in factories are today taken manually and also manually entered into the computer. It is assumed that, ideally, information from meters should be automatically transferred to EGAIS - from this moment the introduction of the system could be considered completely completed. However, there are big problems with installing meters - there are not enough devices themselves, and their installation is very expensive.
The two-year struggle of the “alcohol controllers”, who were appointed tax officers by the will of the government of Mikhail Fradkov, with the EGAIS system, which was catastrophically inconvenient to use, led to the fact that even the officials themselves began to lose their nerve. In mid-summer 2007, the head of the Federal Tax Service, Mikhail Mokretsov, proposed to completely abandon the system of control over the production and circulation of alcohol, leaving it only as an information one. He wrote about this in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Fradkov.
The introduction of the Unified State Automated Information System did not reduce the share of illegal production and turnover of products, Mr. Mokretsov assured then in his letter, citing data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, according to which, during the year of the system’s operation, the volume of ethyl alcohol withdrawn from illegal circulation increased from 300 to 454 thousand decaliters, and alcohol products - from 699 to 743 thousand decaliters.
In September, departments directly or indirectly involved in the system of regulation of the alcohol market, namely the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, the Federal Tax Service, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Federal Customs Service, prepared a report for the president on reforming the Unified State Automated Information System. Then it was proposed to postpone the introduction of the automatic operating mode of the system to a later date. At one time, STC Atlas, the first developer of the system, advocated for the exclusion of wholesalers from EGAIS, realizing that it was not possible to “cover” wholesalers with it.
When new developers from the State Research Computing Center of the Federal Tax Service also admitted that they had failed to cope with this problem, the issue of excluding wholesalers from EGAIS again became relevant at the government level.
Therefore, it cannot be said that these decisions came as stunning news for market participants. They were expected. Moreover, two months ago it was known that the government was, in principle, ready to postpone the transfer of meters to automatic mode until next year. True, a different date was named - July 1, 2008.
“It is obvious that by November 1, 2007, which is only a few days away, the market is not ready to switch to automatic mode, so everyone was sitting on pins and needles.” This is how Dmitry Dobrov, press secretary of the Union of Alcohol Producers, described the producers’ feelings to Vremya Novostey. The withdrawal of the wholesale link from the EGAIS, Mr. Dobrov believes, is not only a nod to wholesalers, but also means a serious simplification of the system: “If there is a legal bottle produced by a legal manufacturer, and information about this is entered in the EGAIS, then what difference does it make? Which region will it go through which wholesaler?”
In general, market participants experienced, according to them, ambivalent sensations from the government regulations promulgated yesterday: relief and at the same time fear that this was only a respite before the next innovations on the alcohol front, which could occur after the parliamentary and presidential elections.
“Of course, sooner or later a normally functioning system of control over the alcohol market will be introduced. EGAIS could also be suitable for this purpose if it is properly introduced and tested. If two years had been spent not on launching and debugging the crude system, but on trial operation, a normally debugged system could have been introduced right now, says Vadim Drobiz, director of the information department of the Union of Alcohol Market Participants (SUAR). “And all that remains is the feeling of huge amounts of money wasted, about $300 million, which market participants were forced to spend on the purchase and installation of equipment that has now become unnecessary.”
In the regime in which EGAIS will exist from now on, it is generally unclear why it is needed, Mr. Drobiz believes: “Having removed the wholesale link, it is impossible to control retail in this system. In addition, they promise to remove low-alcohol cocktails and wine from the system. It turns out that only producers of spirits and spirits will transmit information to the system.”
The main argument that justified the introduction of a state control system sounded like this: “not to miss a single drop of alcohol.” The new version of the functioning of the Unified State Automated Information System recognizes the complete fiasco of this thesis. In addition to the fact that the illegal alcohol market continues to flourish in the country today, at the same time there is a system of control over a very narrow segment of the alcohol market, which is expensive for business and capital-intensive for the state, the information value of which is rapidly approaching zero.