Budget Subsidies: Conflict between Public and Private

The ambiguity of interpretation of the norms of the Budget Code of the Russian Federation regarding the establishment of the amount of the subsidy to be refunded in case of violation by legal entities of the procedure and conditions for its provision has led to a change in subordinate law-making and judicial enforcement: the vector has shifted from the requirement to refund the entire amount of the subsidy received to the requirement to refund the subsidy in the part corresponding to the identified violation. Such a transformation of law-making and law enforcement has led to a violation of public interest in the financial sphere, which consist in the fact that the funds of the budgets of public legal entities are spent targeted, for the intended purpose, and, accordingly, that the subsidy as a form of state (municipal) support is provided to those persons who meet the requirements established in regulatory legal acts. The subject of the study are legal relations on the return of subsidies by legal entities that violated the procedure and conditions for granting subsidies, as well as legal conflicts and conflicts arising in this regard. The purpose of the study is: to determine whether the balance of private and public interests is observed by the current legal regulation of relations on the return of subsidies by legal entities. In the process of developing the problem, the following special research methods were used by authors: formal legal, legal technical and historical legal, as well as overall research methods of cognition: analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction. Based on the analysis of judicial practice of arbitration courts and regulatory legal acts regulating the procedure and conditions for the submission of subsidies, a conclusion is made about the violation of public interests by the current regulation of the return of subsidies to the budget, allowing partial refund of subsidies, and proposals are formulated to amend the Budget Code of the Russian Federation and subordinate regulatory legal acts in order to achieve legal certainty and unambiguity of legislative regulations, the formation of a unified judicial practice. An integral justification for this conclusion is a detailed study of the most significant court decisions confirming the controversial, ambiguous, “vicious” regulation of the procedure for returning subsidies to the budget by legal entities.

judicial practice, public interests, balance of interests, subsidy, refund of subsidies, recipient of subsidies, budget legislation, Budget Code