Public Financial Control: Searching of Nature

Abstract

Financial control is understood as a term that covers different control activities of the national and local governments in the public finance sector by Russian scholars. Such understanding demonstrates the use of the “sectoral approach” to interpret financial control, while scholars put forward various positions explaining the inclusion of tax control, currency control and control (supervision) by the Bank of Russia, including control over monetary circulation, in public financial control sphere. In past and nowadays, scholars in public finance law put forward the idea of integrating all types of public control under a single law on national and local financial control. Meanwhile, this paper substantiates the failure of the use of the sectoral approach to understand of financial control and justifies the use of the substantive approach to development of a doctrinal concept of financial control. The closest examination of financial control and its correlation with currency, tax control and banking supervision on subjects and objectives demonstrates their essential differences. Public financial control does not combine various types of control over public finance, but it is an independent type of control on a par with tax and currency control. The paper also differentiates between control and supervision, primarily depending on the inclusion in the financial resources management. It substantiates failure of the proposition that an audit is a type of financial control. The study of the legal framework of financial control suggests financial control is not only a public law category, but also private law category. It is carried out by the owner of financial resources as an interested person. The author criticizes the idea that the term “budgetary control” should be established by the Budgetary Code of Russia, because this change will only be editorial in nature and will not allow building a “single system” of public control in the public finance sector under a single law.