Within a year, the Accounts Chamber may request for itself more powers to combat corruption in order to become a center of competence in this area, said its chairman Alexei Kudrin (quoted by Interfax). Currently, the auditor’s powers in this area are not actually spelled out in legislation, Kudrin said; on the contrary, he intends to focus on this. Auditors, he said, will study ways to combat corruption, including using their special powers to access the information systems of government agencies and organizations, and together with supervised bodies and enterprises, develop proposals for improving their work. As a result, Kudrin promised to reduce the opportunities for “corruption loopholes” and the number of corrupt officials.

Increasing the effectiveness of the fight against corruption is named one of the priorities of the Accounts Chamber in the department’s strategy until 2024. On Friday, the document was published on the Accounts Chamber’s website. It describes the goals that the department wants to achieve under Kudrin's leadership by 2024, the end of Vladimir Putin's fourth presidential term. The strategic goal is to help achieve national goals by improving the government audit system. It is expected to achieve this through project management and digitalization of processes for continuous and remote control.

The Accounts Chamber intends to increase the efficiency of public resource management by ensuring public control over this process, as well as to promote publicity and openness of government decision-making processes. The auditors will also prepare for heads of government bodies and government organizations “a comprehensive, long-term picture of the trends and risks of the country’s development” to form their “strategic vision.” The joint venture plans to stimulate the development of internal audit of government agencies, as well as “through openness” to develop the “sense of a taxpayer”, to ensure the constitutional right of citizens to participate in the management of state affairs and to increasingly orient the work of government bodies towards public interests, the document lists.

To determine whether this goal is being achieved, the Accounts Chamber is going to monitor what share strategic audit occupies in the portfolio of its own activities, how much demand it makes for the recommendations it issues on the development of the public administration system, as well as how society and business evaluate its activities, the strategy says.

Kudrin became head of the Accounts Chamber in May, after its previous head, Tatyana Golikova, was appointed deputy prime minister. The new chairman announced his intention to focus the auditor’s work on the fight against corruption immediately after deputies approved him in his new position.

Kudrin also plans to expand the powers of his department in matters of inspection of the Central Bank. JV auditor Andrey Perchyan announced this in June. In particular, he asked the State Duma to instruct the Accounts Chamber to include in the inspection plan the use of funds from the Banking Sector Consolidation Fund (FCBS), through which the Central Bank has been sanitizing banks since last year. Now the auditor can check the Central Bank only on the subject of financial and economic activities, servicing the public debt and the budget.

According to VTsIOM, a quarter of Russians believe that the Accounts Chamber, after the appointment of Alexei Kudrin as its chairman, will work better than before, another 29% believe that everything will remain as before, and 43% either found it difficult to answer or have not heard anything about Kudrin.

The Accounts Chamber will ask for additional powers to fight corruption