INDEPENDENT AUDITING OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE AS A TOOL TO IMPROVE THE STATE FINANCIAL CONTROL AUDITORÍA INDEPENDIENTE DEL GASTO PÚBLICO COMO HERRAMIENTA PARA MEJORAR EL CONTROL FINANCIERO DEL ESTADO AUDITORIA INDEPENDENTE DAS DESPESAS PÚBLICAS COMO FERRAMENTA PARA MELHORAR O CONTROLE FINANCEIRO DO ESTADO

Resumo: O controle financeiro estatal (SFC) é parte integrante da administração pública. Seu principal objetivo é identificar desvios dos padrões, violações dos princípios de legalidade, eficiência e economia de recursos o mais cedo possível. Isso permite a adoção oportuna de medidas corretivas e, em alguns casos, reparação financeira e prestação de contas aos autores, além de impedir essas violações no futuro. No entanto, se o controle interno for realizado pelos funcionários, diretamente subordinado ao chefe da organização controlada, não haverá questão de objetividade. Nesse sentido, os autores propõem usar a experiência e as habilidades profissionais dos auditores independentes na auditoria da implementação do orçamento.


Introduction
At present, much attention is paid to the implementation of an effective SFC mechanism in Russia. This is primarily due to the fact that the market economy and the State federated structure create additional governance and control problems at federal, regional and local levels.
In this regard, the priority tasks of state financial control can be as follows ( The auditors have the same objectives verifying the correctness of spending the federal budget funds. In this case, the main goal is to assess the effectiveness of their use.

Methods
The data from the official websites of Russian public authorities, TAdviser.ru website, regulatory documents, expert assessments of state financial control development in Russia, scientific articles in professional journals, materials of the audit of financial and business activities of a number of enterprises have been used.

Results
Strengthened corruption-fighting efforts of Russian authorities revealed the increased number of reported crimes and crimes under investigation involving corruption. As a rule, these are facts of embezzlement, misappropriation, misuse and inefficient use of budget resources.
In almost all cases, budget recipients create schemes of funds withdrawal and misappropriation to the detriment of interests of the State.

Recently, federal inspectors have revealed corruption offenses in Chelyabinsk region
where the major repair of a sports facility was done. The customer -recipient of funds from the federal budgetcontracted with a contractor who did not even simulated the construction and installation work specified by the contract, but, nevertheless, received the entire sum. When inspectors of works discovered this violation, the head of the contracting company was already abroad.
This embezzlement of public funds is impossible without the involvement of chief executives and affiliated persons (often the members of their families).
The main feature of such situations is that the use of state budgetary funds was controlled inefficiently. In accordance with the Budget Code, the management of organizations and enterprises receiving budget provisions must ensure strict control over their effective use and take measures to prevent violations of budget discipline. But the control activities are often organized in such a way that they do not run counter to the management's ownership interests. Another case of embezzlement to be noticed took place in one of the largest publishing houses in Europe, which was a branch of a Russian federal unitary enterprise. The new chief executive of the branch caused damage of about 18 million rubles over six months and led the enterprise to bankruptcy. He transferred state assets to an affiliated company, the head of which he was before, redirected cash flows to a company controlled by his son and committed a number of other violations, some of them interested law enforcement agencies. Obviously, there was no internal control in the enterprise. According to the inspectors from parent organization, no violations were found. Later it turned out that the head of the parent organization was a military service colleague of chief executive under his authority.
The situations described above show that, at present, the state financial control system in the Russian Federation requires serious improvement. The lack of a well-functioning mechanism of state financial control negatively affects the entire structure of state power, promotes corruption, which is the most sensitive subject of Russian economy and a clear obstacle to achieving the strategic goals of the country. In our opinion, the principal reasons for the inefficacy of public financial management are the following: 1) Late response to the violations, which allows hiding significant amounts of funds and makes their return difficult, even impossible. It is usually done by allocating funds to affiliated companies, after which it is difficult to track cash flows, since often no document can be found. The schemes are used to transfer assets to off-shore jurisdictions, which also significantly complicates control.
It should be noted that all illegal schemes are not original and, as a rule, have historical analogues.
2) It is difficult to prove the criminal intent of managers in their choice of contractors.
Numerous facts of violations in public procurement procedure confirm the imperfection of the current legislation.
This point can be illustrated by the example of an enterprise engaged in water supply and sanitation in the Krasnodar Region. The head of this enterprise leased communal facilities owned by his son's company for several years, which is violation of current law. Prior to their acquisition by son's company, the facilities were on the balance sheet of municipalities that were looking for an organization to transfer them to, since their maintenance was burdensome.
They were sold for an amount not exceeding half a million rubles. Then, the acquirer leased the Práxis Educacional e-ISSN 2178-2679

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facilities to the father's municipal enterprise for 3 million rubles a year. At the same time, the tender was held in accordance with laws on public procurement. Since the facilities were old, , the enterprise annually carried out their major repair according to the documents provided. As a result, the amount of enterprise operating expenses grew, which led to a decrease in profit not exceeding 100 thousand rubles given an annual turnover of billion rubles. Since the enterprise was municipal property, a quarter of its profit should have been transferred to the municipal district budget.
This scheme worked for almost four years, until it was disclosed by independent auditors. In this regard, questions arise about the feasibility of transactions and the effectiveness of municipal control. Sometimes, funds came to the enterprise's accounts a year and a half after they were received from the population. It has been suggested that a part of this money was embezzled by the head of the enterprise and his son, who was registered as an agent collecting fees for water supply and sanitation services.
In addition, water tariffs for the population of this municipal district were higher than those established by the Regional Department of tariffs in the field of housing and communal services. Moreover, these facts were revealed by Department inspectors two years later.
It should be noted that the municipal administration repeatedly attempted to dismiss the head of enterprise in question, but the court reinstated him each time, since the documents did not give evidence against him. Only after the inspection report was issued and transferred to the customer, this manager was fired. However, nothing is known about the damage compensation caused by him to the enterprise.
3) It is difficult to determine the efficiency of resource use. There is no methodology for determining the effectiveness of public spending, the criteria and performance indicators are not defined, since the ultimate goals of projects using budget funds are not always commercial.
Commonly, the results of State-funded projects are social facilities, new weapons, space equipment, sports facilities, etc. As a rule, these are not typical projects; they have unique characteristics, which greatly complicate the calculation of their planned cost. Often this leads to the constant cost increases. Moreover, failure to achieve goals can be easily explained by well as mobilization of existing production, finance and other resources. It is a part of enterprise management system that serves to ensure a long-term financial stability, and aims to increase company management efficiency (Volkov & Chernysheva, 2011).
The most important elements of internal control are risk identification, risk analysis, managerial decisions aimed at its elimination, reduction and minimization.
The problem of assessing the risk of abuse is directly related to a reckless negligence both in conducting business in general and in choosing contractors in particular.
Internal control is a management tool that allows for the most efficient implementation The internal financial control is applied to the totality of financial and business transactions performed in the system of budget funds administrator in the reporting period (Kotoyan, 2018).
The organization of internal control with the use of external auditors is an important factor in improving the efficiency of budget funds. In this case, the objectivity and reliability of the results is achieved through the main principle of audit: its independence. The employees of the enterprise internal control unit are a priori subordinate to its head, whose managerial decisions they must control, therefore they cannot be independent and objective.
Since the practice of independent auditors is more varied, their controlling toolkit includes more different control methods. Modern internal control systems are often transformed into a risk assessment tool; there is a shift in emphasis from the assessment of individual operations to the assessment of enterprise's risk potential. However, it is necessary to control not only the economic activities, accounting and reporting, but also the audit transactions, events, operations that affect the financial situation of an economic entity, the financial result of its activities and cash flow. Moreover, the effectiveness of control will be higher if it is carried out in the monitoring mode.
The construction of a monitoring system for principal financial indicators can be broken in the following main steps: 1) development of a system of informative reporting indicators for each type of financial control, based on the data of financial and management accounting. This system represents the so-called "primary monitoring database", which is necessary

Findings
The reasons for the low efficiency of SFC are the following: -In Russia, state financial control has a retrospective nature. This leads to a late response to violations which allows the perpetrators to hide a significant amount of funds and makes their return difficult, even impossible; -It is hard to prove criminal intent in senior managers' choice of contractors; -It is difficult to determine the effectiveness of budget funds use without comprehensive methods of its calculation; -There are no adequate measures to hold violators accountable in Russian budget legislation.
An important point is the low efficiency of internal control system in budgetary organizations. This can be explained by the reluctance of the heads of these organizations to provide access to control and evaluation of their actions, which affects the personnel selection.
In addition, we cannot talk about the complete independence of internal controllers, since they are full-time employees and their wages depend on senior manager decision.
In this regard, it is advisable to engage independent auditors who possess a large kit of modern control tools, and, which is most important, -they must have no links with the audited Práxis Educacional e-ISSN 2178-2679 Revista 621 entity. They can work under an outsourcing agreement ensuring the remote access to the information base of the audited entity. Reports will be periodically transmitted to a higher organization, if necessary, with an appendix in the form of video and photo reports, when, for example, construction and installation works are carried out. At the same time, the control in the monitoring mode will be more effective.
At the end of August 2018, it was made public that the Russian control and supervision authorities (CSA) may start using the big data technologies to collect and analyze information about the objects to monitoring. The system has the working name of "digital inspector", the Vedomosti newspaper writes with reference to the action plan for digital state administrationa new area of the digital economy (Supervisory authorities will master Big Data, 2019).
It is assumed that the "digital inspector" will collect and analyze data on the objects of supervision and give instructions to human inspectors. Moreover, for each type of state supervision, a set of data necessary for risk assessment will be determined, an informed source reports. According to him, this can be data from state information systems (GIS), company reports in machine-readable form, data from Internet of things sensors and the results of public control.
It is noted that the federal authorities will not have to arm themselves with special software for introducing machine inspection, they should simply upgrade their systems. In turn, regional controllers will take advantage of the revised options for a typical cloud solution for supervision authorities. The provision was approved in April 2018 by the government of Russian Federation. A standard solution should automatically generate registers of the inspected objects and action plans for them, assign risk categories, and interact with other GIS.
By the end of 2018, "Digital Inspector" was used in test mode by Rosprirodnadzorand and Federal Customs Service. The creation of such a technology from scratch is estimated by experts at hundreds of millions rubles, and the time needed to bring it into operation is about two years (Supervisory authorities will master Big Data, 2019).
In our opinion, the use of the experience and professional skills of auditors is more appropriate.