Over the past two years, 2,477 persons have been prosecuted for 371 billion soums worth of embezzlement in Uzbekistan, Prosecutor General Nigmatilla Yuldashev said on Saturday at an interdepartmental meeting on the fight against corruption.
The Finance Minister Timur Ishmetov, commenting on the situation, said that it is impossible to say with 100% certainty that there is no conflict of interest in the system of state financial control. According to him, there are indeed violations of the law in the budget expenditures, and to prevent them, it is necessary to ensure the independence of the financial control bodies.
“Currently the inspection authorities are subordinate to the ministries, which they are supposed to inspect ... In some provinces there is pressure on state financial control bodies from governor offices. That is, are they working for the Ministry of Finance or, as a result of some pressure, are they serving others? We have doubts about this,” he said.
He proposed to completely revise the activities of the state financial control services from a functional point of view. In his opinion, the authority should not be within any ministry.
“It should be such a single, strong and integral system that no ministry or mayor office could be higher than it, until that moment, everything is useless,” Timur Ishmetov explained adding that for this, together with the Accounting Chamber and the Anti-Corruption Agency, a new bill is being developed with the help of foreign experts.
According to him, there is an instruction to develop a completely new project by the end of the year.
The minister added that a new module has also been created in the UzASBO software, with the help of which reports on the achievement of plans by sectors, state and contingent will be submitted to financial authorities in electronic form.
“By automatically collecting industry, state, and population metrics, and comparing reported cash flow data, labor costs and errors will be dramatically reduced. Cases of embezzlement budget funds will be prevented,” the minister explained.
According to the prosecutor general, the damage to the economy from corruption topped 2 trillion soums, or US$ 200 million in two years.
