Translated material
Gosalkokontrol
The Ministry of Finance, after a gap of 112 years, becomes the regulator of the alcohol market
The alcohol industry, it seems, may have a single regulator in the foreseeable future . The Ministry of Finance has created a new department for regulatory regulation, control and supervision of the production and circulation of alcohol, alcohol-containing and alcoholic products. This could be one of the decisive steps in the process of introducing a state monopoly on alcohol, which the government has been thinking about for a long time. However, so far the staff of the new department is too modest, and the current head of the Ministry of Finance, Alexei Kudrin, having received deputy prime minister status and extensive powers, is clearly not eager to be responsible for the situation in the alcohol market, which is not core for the financial department. The last time the Ministry of Finance in Russia performed similar functions was at the end of the 19th century - at the very beginning of the reign of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II.Yesterday it turned out that the new department of the Ministry of Finance in the department of tax and customs tariff policy has actually been in effect since October 1, but the official order for its creation was signed on October 22. According to the department, the department was created due to the large amount of work related to regulatory documents in the alcohol market. It is quite logical that the head of the new structure was a person very closely familiar with the specifics of control work - it was headed by Vladislav Spirin, who was previously the head of the department for coordination and control of the activities of the Federal Tax Service (FTS). In addition, it is the Federal Tax Service, subordinate to the Ministry of Finance, that is the operator of the Unified State Automated System for Control over the Turnover of Alcohol Products (USAIS), which has caused a lot of noise. The new division of the Ministry of Finance still has only five people, but there is no doubt that its staff will grow.
For now, the new division of the Ministry of Finance will deal exclusively with rule-making. This is exactly how Mr. Spirin defined the essence of his activities, whose words were quoted by news agencies yesterday. According to the official, such a structure has been created in the Ministry of Finance for the first time since 1895, when the ministry had a department dealing with the wine monopoly. The Federal Tax Service will continue to be responsible for the Unified State Automated Information System, that is, to directly monitor the market, and the Ministry of Finance department will be responsible for rule-making.
It is symptomatic that the creation of a new structure almost coincided with the announcement of the freezing of the Unified State Automated Information System for a year. It is for this period that the government decided that the system will continue to operate in semi-automatic mode. In a year, as experts and market participants agree, a new regulatory structure may appear in the field of industry regulation. It is possible that by that time the Ministry of Finance department will have grown into just such an interdepartmental structure, from which a single regulatory body will be formed under the new government.
Some experts are inclined to believe that the decision to create a new department was made immediately after the status of the Minister of Finance was upgraded to Deputy Prime Minister as indirect evidence of such long-term plans. After all, logically, the Ministry of Finance does not need a new headache in the form of regulation of the alcohol market. And the direct subordinates of the Ministry of Finance, the tax authorities, expressed extreme pessimism back in the summer about their responsibilities to control the alcohol market: in an open letter to the Prime Minister, the head of the Federal Tax Service, Mikhail Mokretsov, actually admitted the fiasco of the Unified State Automated Information System and the role of the tax authorities as inspectors.
Market participants, for their part, reacted quite positively to the news of the emergence of a new control structure. According to the head of the media relations department of the Union of Alcohol Market Participants, Vadim Drobiz, it would be easier for the industry to have one “owner” instead of the current several.