August 19 2003, 13:45 APK-Inform

State subsidies to livestock sector are used inefficiently - Department for Control and Revisions

Deputy Head of the Chief Office of Ukraine's Department for Control and Revisions (governmental authority for financial control) Natalia Ruban, speaking to a news conference August 19, has said that in comparison with quite substantial state funds, allocated for development of livestock sector (over 3.3 billion hryvnias, which is 15 percent of the value of industry's output in the year 2000; 5.33 hryvnias = $1), the development of the industry has remained on a poor level (in 2001 volumes of production increased by just 7 percent). This signifies that the state subsidies were used not efficiently enough.

According to State Tax Administration, in the years 2001 and 2002 processing enterprises allocated to agricultural producers 1.283 billion hryvnias of subsidies, of which 1.250 billion was actually paid, i.e. agricultural producers were refunded VAT for this sum for the products they produced. Besides that, through special governmental programmes of reduced charging value added tax, livestock breeders received 1.977 billion hryvnias of state funds, and within the framework of special-purpose budget programmes for development of livestock industry they received some 170 million hryvnias more of budget funds.

At the same time, because of absence of precise procedure of control over passage of the funds on all stages and disorder in analysis of reported data as for accrued and remitted sums of subsidies, more than 3 million hryvnias of these sums were misused. Besides, some agricultural producers received excessive sums from those they were eligible for, which totalled 1.1 million hryvnias, while others were underpaid more than 13 million hryvnias.