The Share of Secret Expenditures Has Reached the Maximum Level in 10 Years

On June 13, at the Web-site of the President of the Russian Federation Federal Law No.133-FZ of June 7, 2013 on Amendment of the Federal Law on the Federal Budget in 2013 and the 2014-2015 Planned Period approved by the State Duma on May 24 was published.
The above law did not change the total value of expenditures of the federal budget in 2013 (Rb 13, 387.3bn) and indices of the 2014-2015 planned period; the whole thing boiled down to redistribution of the current year budget allocations in the amount of Rb 251.0bn of which Rb 125.8bn was received at the expense of saving of budget funds.

It is to be noted that expenditures on public normative obligations, pre-school education, social security of individual categories of people, as well as growth in remuneration of individual categories of workers were increased by Rb 64.6bn; Rb 42.0bn was additionally allocated on the State Program of Development of Agriculture and Regulation of Markets of Agricultural Products and Rb 20.0bn was allocated on increase of the charter capital of OAO RZhD and subsidies to the railway transport for passenger transportation.

 

Though expenditures of the federal budget on national defense, law and order and law enforcement were generally increased by Rb 13.3m, expenditures on the item "National Defense" were reduced in the middle of the year for the first time since September 2009 when there was a crisis (a reduction of Rb 6.5bn). The latter - with taking into account the data of the February Report of the Federal Treasury - amounted to Rb 2,099.9bn, having decreased by 10% as compared to the index of the previous year.

 

Secret allocations of the federal budget were increased by Federal Law No.133-FZ by Rb 12.9bn or 0.1 p.p. of the total expenditures of the federal budget with the share of secret allocations amounting to the maximum value (14.2%) in the ten-year period of observation.

 

Such explicit adherence of budget makers to the longstanding practice of building up secret expenditures is perceived as inconsistency with the intentions expressed by the President of the Russian Federation on June 13 "to ensure greater transparency and openness of the budgetary process" and contradicts the spirit of both the Lough Erne declaration signed by him at the G8 Summit on June 18 and the Open Data Charter which was passed at that summit, as well.

No wonder, the above law has not been published so far (June 25) on the Web-site of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation.

 

V.B. Zatsepin, PhD (Military Science), Head of the Economics of the Military-Industrial Sector Department

Tuesday, 25.06.2013