OREANDA-NEWS  Against the background of the detention of Deputy Head of the Ministry of Finance Maxim Parshin on suspicion of receiving a bribe, the ministry suspended the issuance of grants in the IT sphere for import substitution projects until September. The Ministry also intends to conduct a review of grant decisions in 2022-2023 and "cancel projects for which there are doubts." In total, 26 projects worth 18.2 billion rubles were supported during this period. Market participants note that we are talking mainly about the development of industrial software, and a significant part of the projects in the field of system-wide have not been supported. But they attribute it, rather, to bureaucratic delays.

The Ministry of Finance will suspend the issuance of new grants for new developments in the field of IT until September 1, the ministry said in the official Telegram channel. In addition, the Ministry will conduct an independent assessment of the competencies of employees of the RFRIT Foundation (the main grant operator), update the composition of decision-making bodies and the pool of experts involved in the evaluation of applications, as well as audit the decisions made on grants in 2022-2023 and "cancel projects for which there are doubts about 100% purity."

The Ministry of Finance also wants to optimize the decision-making processes on grants "in order to completely exclude the influence of employees of the Ministry of Finance on them, to ensure transparency and publicity of all stages of the launch and implementation of projects."

To do this, an inspection commission will be created headed by the head of the Ministry, Maksut Shadaev, which will include representatives of the main IT associations (APKIT, Russoft, Domestic Software, etc.), expert organizations. She will check the validity of all refusals to support projects, the presence of a conflict of interest, and will also consider all complaints and suggestions for optimizing processes and procedures, present the results of the audit of projects.