Citizens will be able to use this money to fund their children’s school fees
During a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the winners of the «It's Family» contest, the issue of payments to families with children was raised. The head of state supported the proposal to allow the use of the remaining maternity capital for household needs. Putin proposed using these funds to pay for children's school fees. Previously, maternity capital could only be used for a limited number of purposes: buying real estate, paying for children's education, etc. MK asked experts how to treat the new opportunities and whether there are any risks to this initiative.
One of the participants in the all-Russian competition “It’s in our family” appealed to Vladimir Putin with a request to allow her to spend the remainder of her maternity capital. The President said he was aware of this problem. “This is a well-known situation: after people spend the bulk of their maternity capital, there remains some small amount with which it seems that nothing can be done,” — noted the head of state. Putin added that he had already discussed this issue with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova. “We need to allow people to use the remaining money, — stated the president. — Let us make ten thousand first, and then we’ll see, maybe we’ll take other steps. We need to organize the work in such a way that people can use these funds: just pay the families this money and that’s it.” At the same time, Golikova has already calculated how many such remains can be transferred to the Russians. “In total, 1.5 billion rubles of unspent maternity capital funds will be paid,” — said the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. According to Putin, this money will be sent to citizens so that they can prepare their children for school.
All the experts interviewed — from lawyers and financiers to social sector specialists — The president's proposal was supported. In Article 7 of Law N256-FZ “On additional measures of state support for families with children” the procedure for managing maternity capital funds has been determined. “In some cases, a situation arises when families spend part of the funds, and balances appear on the accounts that families no longer use, — The assistant professor of the basic department of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation “Human Resource Management” clarifies the situation. REU im. G.V. Plekhanova Lyudmila Ivanova-Shvets. — This is exactly the case when citizens can receive insignificant balances from maternity capital. A completely logical and correct proposal: the money still belongs to the family, thus the number of accounts in the SFR will be reduced. To do this, most likely, it will be necessary to make changes to the law on the procedure for paying maternity capital.
In general, the practice of paying out funds from maternity capital has existed in Russia for several years. As the chairman of the Rostov Regional Bar Association “Paritet” said: Nadezhda Shvyreva, now in our country cash payments from maternity capital are already made as child benefits in case of insufficient income, so the new initiative does not bring anything bad. However, before this, even with legislative restrictions on the ways of spending maternity capital, cases of fraud arose, precisely in order to receive cash. Investigations periodically appear in the press about how in Russia swindlers, with whom the mothers themselves enter into collusion, try to cash out maternity capital in an illegal manner. The most common method — buying cheap housing that is impossible to live in. According to the documents, a tidy sum is spent on real estate that is not worth a penny, and it is sold by realtors, who then pay the buying family a portion of the money spent in cash. And it turns out that the worse the housing sold in this way, the greater the benefits for the participants in the transaction. For example, in 2020, one such mother from the city of Volzhsky, in the Volgograd region, decided to cash out her maternity capital. To do this, she asked a realtor friend to find uninhabitable real estate. As a result, the parties entered into an agreement to supposedly “improve living conditions” and then terminated it. As a result, the mother received 330 thousand rubles, and another 140 thousand rubles went in equal shares to the realtor and the owner of the oversized housing. However, soon the mother of many children filed a police report against other participants in the scheme, as a result of which the fraud was discovered.
In November 2020, in Tomsk, a woman was convicted of similar real estate fraud. She took out a fictitious loan from a credit cooperative and then repaid it using maternal capital funds. The woman spent the money she received “for personal needs.” But when the fraud was discovered, the defendant was brought to justice: the court gave her a two-year suspended sentence. “Unfortunately, fraudulent actions have a certain probability; they will arise during any economic phenomenon or process and are in no way related exclusively to maternal capital, — Andrey Girinsky, associate professor of the Faculty of Economics at RUDN University, comments on these cases. — The conditions for using maternity capital change over time, and rightly so, since they must be adapted to the current economic situation and the needs of citizens.”
In addition, the task of the law — to protect, first of all, respectable Russians and honest families, who are the majority. The initiative, supported by the president, is aimed at precisely this. According to Alexander Safonov, a professor at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, the decision on the possibility of using the remainder of maternity capital in cash for household needs is certainly correct. It makes no sense to keep small amounts of money in accounts, since the rate of inflation constantly depreciates it and eventually it will lose its value altogether. “There are no downsides to this decision, since it is difficult to assume that these funds will not go to the needs of the family: any expenses in families are made (except for expenses on bad habits) for the good,” — the expert emphasized. Fraud developed in relation to the principal amount, when, using forged documents on the purchase of housing, money was cashed out for other purposes. If the main amount is spent on targeted tasks (housing, treatment, care or education), then a small residual amount will not create preconditions for fraudulent schemes, Safonov is convinced.
Economists also point out that it is unprofitable for scammers to work in this segment with in such small amounts. According to financial expert Alexey Krichevsky, there is nothing wrong with the new initiative to use the remaining maternity capital funds and there is no scope for de facto scammers to work either, because a case would look very strange when a family could lose a certificate because of 10 thousand rubles, in what is the additional advantage of using such a small amount.