How the card will fall

Rosnedvizhimost may be merged with the Geodesy and Cartography Agency

On the eve of the emergence of a new government in Russia (this will happen in May), versions of changes in its structure, merger or division of certain departments arise. One of these changes could be the creation of a state committee that is fundamentally new for the country.

A state committee uniting Roscartography (Federal Agency of Geodesy and Cartography) and Rosnedvizhimost (Federal Real Estate Cadastre Agency) may soon appear in the government structure. According to a Vremya Novostey source close to Rosnedvizhimost, presumably the new department will be called the State Committee for the Cadastre of Real Estate, Geodesy and Cartography.

The State Committee, if such a merger occurs, is planned to be formed from departments of various subordination. Rosnedvizhimost is subordinate to the Ministry of Justice, Roscartography is subordinate to the Ministry of Transport. At one time, after the transfer of Rosnedvizhimost to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, many assumed that sooner or later Rosnedvizhimost would merge with Rosregistration. This would be advisable to create a so-called “one-window” system for registering real estate rights, when the same department is engaged in compiling and maintaining cadastral passports for apartments and land plots, as well as registering ownership of these objects.

A new option for optimizing the work of departments involves a different combination of the structures of the two departments on the principle of optimizing the accounting of real estate objects, the correct inventory of which is impossible without adequate cartographic, topographic and geodetic tools. If the work on creating a cadastre of real estate objects was figuratively called “linking buildings to land plots,” then the merger of Rosnedvizhimost and Roskartografiya can be called “attaching maps to land.”

There is information that the state committee may be headed by officials from the current Rosnedvizhimost, in particular Alexey Malkov, a native of St. Petersburg, or Vladimir Samoletov, who came to Rosnedvizhimost from the former Ministry of Taxes and Duties together with Mikhail Mishustin, the former head of the real estate cadastre agency.

The merger of the two agencies looks quite logical from a functional point of view, experts say. Unless the new structure acquires additional bureaucratic staff. “The administrative reform of 2004 also implied the optimization of departmental activities, but one of the very first results of the reform was an increase in the number of officials,” says Pavel Salin from the Center for Political Conjuncture. In addition, there are already many draft presidential decrees on the creation of certain departments, their mergers and amalgamations in various configurations, but the projects still remain projects, the expert recalls.

“The structure of the new government may become reliably known only in the first week of May, for now one can only assume that in the new version of the government, “cluster” deputy prime ministers in charge of their areas will be strengthened, and new structural units - state committees will be created,” - Mr. Salin believes.

Irina SKLYAROVA