Russians do not believe in authenticity of civil servant income declarations - poll
MOSCOW. May 5 (Interfax) - Russians are skeptical about the authenticity of civil servants' income declarations; only one percent believe the declarations are real, sociologists from the Levada Center told Interfax on Tuesday.
Eighty-eight percent of respondents in an April poll said that civil servants were concealing some of their income. The opinion was most frequently voiced by Muscovites (84%), people with low incomes (82%) and people younger than 24 and aged 25 to 39 (80%).
The Russian Prosecutor General's Office called the declarations submitted by civil servants unsatisfactory. "Civil servants of all levels made numerous violations in the submission of their income declarations for 2010. More than a half of the violations were exposed in the checking of municipal officers' income declarations," the Prosecutor General's Office spokesperson Marina Gridneva said on April 27.
The Prosecutor General's Office fulfilled the president's directive and checked the compliance of civil servants with the Laws on State and Municipal Civil Service and Corruption regarding their duty to submit income and property declarations. The norm is established by Article 8 of the Law on the Suppression of Corruption.
A number of municipal authorities have not approved normative legal acts listing civil servants who must submit their income declarations. There are no regulations for the verification of the reliability and fullness of such declarations either.
More than 41,000 violations were exposed, and prosecutors lodged more than 1,500 protests and nearly 9,000 reports for eliminating them. Administrative charges were brought against over 6,000 officials.
Most frequently, civil servants did not declare real estate, land and corporate stock in their ownership.
