In the Tomsk region after several failed competitions getting ready finally to the appointment of a new head of the Chamber of Control and Accounts. According to my information, for the first time it will be a woman, a professional tax officer, candidate of economic sciences, deputy head of the Federal Tax Service for the Tomsk region Irina Zhalonkina. Now she oversees field inspections and control and analytical activities. She is 48 years old, but since she has been working in the tax authorities since 2002, she has earned herself a civil servant’s pension.
It seems that the matriarchal Tomsk practice of appointing imposing lawyers with lush mustaches to such posts has come to an end. This time, someone (apparently, Mazur himself) put up a barrier to another native of law enforcement agencies, who understands little about finance. The Chamber of Control and Accounts will have every chance of becoming the subject body of financial audits and control. So far, it is just an expensive supplier of “information for thought and discussion,” as our Legislative Duma likes to say.
Meanwhile, the finances of the Tomsk region are singing romances in all sectors. With the marginal deficit of the regional budget, there is almost the same marginal inefficiency in spending funds. The situation is no better within the large budget recipients, which include Tomsk universities. One could turn a blind eye to pranks with cashing out grants (which of the rectors did not do this in their youth!), but in the current situation, effective and preventive financial control becomes a way to stay free.
It is characteristic that in the same TPU, ex-rector Pyotr Chubik struggled to maintain control over the gigantic, 15-18 billion rubles, budget of the university, which flowed in streams into the pockets of scientific businessmen. Pyotr Savelyevich even created the Control and Auditing Department and invited the most authoritative in Tomsk to join it civil financier, Lyudmila Smolnikova, who had just left the Tomsk mayor’s office. And at first there were even serious successes. It was possible to reduce the cost of capital construction projects by tens of millions of rubles. Stop criminal schemes, like the case of Vice-Rector Baidali. But under Governor Zhvachkin, who established with TPU a de facto reference channel for squandering budget funds through the Clean Water program, serious financiers at the university became unnecessary.
But it has long been known that a harmful accountant is better than a good investigator.
Photo: Federal Tax Service