Kudrin presents the "count"

Will the new strategy help turn the peripheral department into an independent political player

Last week, Aleksei Kudrin, who settles in the role of the Chamber of County Chamber, presented the new strategy of the department until 2024. In principle, the old would have fit for another year, but Kudrin decided to hurry up and set a new vector for the development of the site controlled by him. Therefore, in the text in the “Mission” section, the expressions “Fighter for Justice”, “Guarantor of Transparency” and “The Center for Competence” appeared.

Previously, the Accounts Chamber was a utilitarian structure that solved certain tasks - primarily the technical problem of “monitoring management and disposal of state resources” so that the expenditure of these resources led to a “decent human life”. Kudrin and his team also insist on a worthy life of a person (but also on “free development”), but the Accounts Chamber will not only control the management of resources, it will “promote” state bodies that it is as efficient as possible.

Experts familiar with the strategy are only ready to applaud this. But after applause and they have questions.

Further Golikova

How did the Accounts Chamber work before? The department under the leadership of Tatyana Golikova found thousands of violations (6.5 thousand for 2017, for example) in spending money with state structures. The chamber carefully structured all the finds, administrative cases were initiated (389 last year), some of them were considered (267 cases), officials were held accountable. Thus, in 2017 it was possible to collect fines of 23.4 million rubles. And in total, it was possible to return 18.8 billion rubles of ineffectively spent money - of almost two trillions. Some of the instructions of the joint venture are transformed into criminal cases and inspections from the security forces-but here a lot already depends on people in uniform and on their desires and opportunities to do anything.

“The Accounts Chamber has a purely technical task to record violations, but no matter how much it finds them, it usually ends with this,” the expert of the economic expert group Alexander Suslin states. “This, as a rule, did not threaten any sanctions to those who violated any indicators.”

At the same time, the Accounts Chamber always looked very ambitious, and her head Tatyana Golikova was even considered at one time as a potential prime minister (as a result, Golikova became Deputy Prime Minister). Aleksey Kudrin’s ambitions look even more serious: he intends to make the Accounts Chamber a full-fledged participant in the political process in the country-not only through the elimination of “the possibility of abuse, inappropriate and ineffective use of resources”, but also through the assistance of the authorities in the formation of a “promising picture of the socio-economic state of the country and the integrated understanding of the risks of unattending the goals of sustainable development”. That is, the department of Kudrina openly wants to say that the country is moving the wrong way that other methods, other tools, and other routes are needed. And not only to speak, but also to offer.

“Kudrin wants to make the Accounts Chamber almost a cement to change the entire [political] system,” suggests the economist of the FBC Igor Nikolaev. “Of course, such sharp phrases in official statements will not sound, but at the level of experts representing information to Kudrin himself, it may well be.”

To change the system, another tools for evaluating the effectiveness of government departments are needed, and Kudrin directly writes that it needs to be created - this is one of the most important tasks of the new course of SP. Alexandra Suslina believes that this will be done through interaction with various expert venues, as Kudrin proposes in the strategy (this was not the case with Golikova): “The expenditure indicators are sent for examination to different organizations. This will give a more objective assessment of the effectiveness of these indicators. ” In addition, the new head of the Accounts Chamber wants to make this space open and affordable for international analytical organizations.

But how far will the invited experts go in their assessments and how wide the circle of these people will be? Igor Nikolaev believes that the “completely elongated” experts will definitely be outlined, but such people will be selected who are not so much criticized as they offer “movement forward”:

"Kudrin if you go to the head with a saber, you can quickly stop being the head of the Accounts Chamber."

This simple consideration will inevitably be displayed in the fact that it will officially voice the joint venture even in its own open spaces. “There are no illusions regarding the free autonomous work of the department [from the rest of the players],” says Alexander Suslin. “Cudrin will need to constantly maneuver and look for compromises.”

In addition, in his attempts to change the entire system with the help of his chamber, the former Minister of Finance will inevitably come across rejection by large political figures, which are clearly not used to the fact that the “counting” of the same player as they themselves. “None of the other ministries simply need a new status of the joint venture, so there will be pressure - do your previous technical work. But this does not mean that nothing needs to be done, ”Nikolaev is sure.

The risks of Kudrin

Much of Kudrin’s activity and the power of his political resource will depend on how his actions are correlated with the thoughts of Vladimir Putin. President Kudrin trusts: it was he, Dmitry Oreshkin recalls, came up with money to save money to funds, as a result of which the country was able to relatively calmly survive the crisis of 2008-2009.

“Kudrin is a rationally thinking person, therefore, when he agreed to the post in the Accounts Chamber, he probably discussed his independence with Putin,” says Oreshkin. - The counting chamber and its new vector are not quite a dummy. Kudrin knows how to use the priority of information resources. And his word as the head of the official structure will now be much higher. ”

In practice, this means that according to the results of the inspections of the joint venture, the resonance will be stronger, and some officials may well lose their posts. Or they can’t: it’s hard to imagine how Kudrin will be able to fight the conditional Igor Ivanovich or Dmitry Olegovich. With regard to Roscosmos, the Accounts Chamber has already made its move: last year, 40 percent of the violations were associated precisely with the Rogozin department, and at the end of June, Kudrin was already unequivocally expressed that criminal cases were instituted.

The advantage of Kudrin is that he can personally go to the president and complain about someone, relying on the results of checks of the Accounts Chamber. In this sense, he, a good counterweight to the growing power block, says Oreshkin: let the liberals, which can be prescribed guilty of economic failures, but alternatives are much worse. Turning the joint venture into a more or less independent mechanism, Kudrin finally returns himself, if not in the top 10, then exactly in the first twenty influential political people.

True, other players may try to convince Putin of “harmfulness” of Kudrin’s actions. Moreover, as soon as the Accounts Chamber begins to go beyond the permissible - and this will sooner or later happen inevitably - it will not live in a reformed form for long, Alexander Suslin is convinced. That is why all Kudrin’s initiatives are doubtful: yes, he will have a certain independence and even the degree of influence on the ministry and government agencies, but there will also be the need to stay in the system without breaking it, but trying to transform it using the same figures. Running inside the same cage - only now on the run can still be screaming and swing your hands.