Matviyenko's budget agenda Families, taxes and regions

Oct 5

Matviyenko opens the zero-reading hearing on the three-year budget, describing a difficult but balanced, socially oriented draft and roughly fifty Council initiatives mostly incorporated. She prioritizes social obligations, defence and military-operation participants' families, and a ten-trillion-ruble children's budget preserving maternity benefits, education, healthcare and children's recreation infrastructure. She urges formalizing undeclared activity, registering property, reviewing tax benefits and streamlining non-tax business charges. She proposes ending the ten-percent VAT preference on expensive seafood, estimating six billion rubles of revenue. On regional finance she discusses equalization grants, nicotine-product excises, earlier budget-loan relief, commercial-debt monitoring, simpler transfer reporting and funding for newly delegated duties. She criticizes expanded school hours without regional funding, asks Siluanov to provide compensation and directs a review of whether the Education Ministry requested it. Her economic judgments and proposed remedies remain attributed; the draft is not enacted.

Matviyenko calls formalizing the economy and undeclared employment an important source of additional revenue, urges identifying unregistered property and land and bringing them into taxable economic use, and says the Federation Council will continue that work. It is an October 5 public call for enforcement, not a newly enacted tax.