Budget Control

the assignment of capital from state incomes or the incomes of higher-ranking budgets to lower-ranking budgets to balance their incomes and expenditures. In the socialist countries the tasks of budget control include ensuring deficit-free balancing of the incomes and expenditures of lower-ranking budgets at the level necessary for fulfillment of the targets of the national economic plan; allocating to each budget those sources that will permit timely and continuous financing of measures outlined by the plan for development of the national economy and social-cultural service to the population; and giving republic and local agencies a material interest in fulfilling the plans for local and ail-Union state incomes and, by the same token, in fulfilling the national economic plan as a whole.

In the first stages of socialist building in the USSR, the primary forms of budget control were subsidies; then from 1924 to 1931 there were subventions (special-purpose state grants to local budgets which required participation by their capital) and then deductions from state incomes and taxes and supplements to them. With the consolidation of national-economic and budget planning, the basic method of budget control became deductions from state incomes and taxes, turned over to lower-ranking budgets in differentiated percentages of the sum of income or tax receipts from the territory of the given soviet, a method which encourages each local soviet and republic to fulfill the plan of all-Union state incomes and taxes. The deduction percentages are differentiated depending on the need for capital to cover expenditures planned in the budget considering the volume of local (assigned) incomes which the given budget is supposed to receive during the forthcoming year. A distinction is drawn between control of the budgets of the Union republics, intrarepublic (Union and autonomous republic) budget control, intraoblast (krai) budget control, and intraraion and intracity (for cities having division by raions) budget control.

The primary sources of capital for budget control in the USSR are the turnover tax, the personal income tax, and certain others. In exceptional cases, specifically when the budget of the republic or local soviet cannot be balanced even if the entire sum (100 percent) of income received on its territory is turned over to it, a subsidy from the state budget is used. Similar forms of budget control are employed in a majority of the socialist countries.

In the capitalist countries, budget control is conditioned, first of all, by the increasing concentration of sources of income (especially taxes) in the hands of the central power. The increasing dependence of local agencies of power on central ones reflects the growing severity of the contradictions between the center and the local areas. The forms of budget control are subsidies, subventions, deductions, and supplements to state taxes.