Electronic payment documents for housing and communal services are planned to be introduced throughout the country.
The relevant bill has been submitted to The State Duma has been submitted for consideration, and it has already been supported by the State Duma commission on ensuring housing rights of citizens and the relevant committee on construction and housing and communal services.
As the authors of this initiative, deputies from the United Russia Legislative Assembly of the Krasnodar Territory, indicate in the explanatory note to their bill, it is necessary to amend the Housing Code, which will change the existing way of informing Russians about payment for housing and communal services.
Thus, they claim, conditions will be created for paying for utilities and capital repairs in an alternative way — by obtaining documents in electronic form. To do this, Russians should be able to refuse to use paper payments by submitting an appropriate application.
I must say that the topic of transferring Russians to electronic payments in the housing and communal services sector has been popping up in the news feeds of various Russian ministries and departments for several years.
Now they are talking about saving money. The authors of the initiative provide calculations with the growing costs of paper payments: according to the estimates of administrative and economic expenses of the regional operator of the Krasnodar Territory, the cost of agency services has more than tripled – from 31.3 million in 2021 to 75 million in 2023.
And for 2024, 100 million rubles have already been provided for these purposes. The initiative, Krasnodar deputies believe, will also help to preserve forest plantations. For example, in the Krasnodar Territory alone, it will be possible to save more than 130 trees per year if at least half of the 1.1 million subscribers in the region switch to electronic delivery of a payment document.
Also, the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Construction and Housing and Communal Services, Deputy Vladimir Koshelev, assures that the transition to electronic notifications on payment for housing and communal services will solve another problem.
Today, he states, paper receipts are sent to the address of the premises, but often it does not coincide with the actual address of the owner’s residence, which makes it difficult for them to receive a payment document.
The reasoning behind this bill seems to be sound, and the advantages of this decision are quite obvious.
However, any most useful innovation inevitably carries some disadvantages. But experts and the authors of the bill prefer to keep silent about them.
Minus number 1
You don’t even need to be a particularly advanced expert in the field of housing and communal services to know that one day any electronic database in Russia may “fall” either due to some kind of global network outage, or due to a simple DDoS attack by hackers.
The consequences are quite predictable.
On the one hand, the database can be completely “merged” into the right hands, and then one can only guess what scope and forms fraudulent actions of lovers of easy money can acquire. Fake “employees of pension funds”, then “gas workers”, then “electricians” continue to walk through our apartments. This army can be replenished by the slender ranks of pseudo-“communal workers” or “bailiffs” who know perfectly well which citizen has underpaid whom and how much, and how to “breed” him.
On the other hand, if this happens, some management company, or even a resource provider, may not be able to avoid the temptation to declare that a particular user did not pay for certain services, and give him a good “debt”. And the unfortunate citizen risks putting in years, proving that he owes nothing to anyone, the base has “fallen”, go find the ends.
And if it comes to court, it will also be a lot of trouble. It’s easier with the usual piece of paper, I presented a tear-off spine, and that’s it. And it is not enough to find an electronic copy of the check at home (not all of them save it after payment), so it also needs to be certified at the bank (and this is a separate epic) or at a notary (unnecessary expenses) so that the court accepts this printed receipt as proper proof of the payer’s correctness.
Minus number 2
The number of pensioners among consumers of public utilities in Russia is great. And not all of them communicate with digital gadgets on “you”.
Grandparents, for whom the concept of “phone” is inextricably linked with the concept of “booth”, still need to be taught to use all the modern “bells and whistles” of smartphones. Yes, and after that you have to control them — whether they press all the buttons the way they should. Indeed, in modern realities, one accidental click “wrong way” is fraught with a paid super-expensive subscription to some unnecessary service, which can be very problematic to disable. The children and grandchildren of “advanced” pensioners know about this problem firsthand.
And what about the elderly orphans? Who and how will protect them from costly Internet spam for the wallet in the case of universal transfer of Russians to electronic payments? To teach how to maintain an electronic database of payments and so on?
And then, experts, talking about saving time when making electronic payments, forget (or simply do not want to remember) that for many lonely old people, going to the post office to pay for housing and communal services is almost the only chance to stay in society and maintain communication with other people. Old people generally don’t hurry much, and standing in line to the operator, you can talk about the weather, and just have a good chat with classmates. Or even find your soulmate, everything happens in life.
Minus number 3
Oleg Pavlov, the head of the Public Consumer Initiative, talking about the idea of mass transfer of Russian citizens to electronic payments in the housing and communal services system, argues that this method of payment for housing and communal services will be convenient for citizens who actively use the Internet and own modern gadgets.
But do not forget that most of our electronic payment services, especially those related to government agencies, are rigidly “sharpened” for a very limited number of payment systems of our largest banks, which can be counted on the fingers of one hand of an unwary millerist.
This means that those who do not use them for one reason or another will have to get them to pay for housing and communal services. But this is an extra occupied memory in a mobile device, unnecessary unnecessary pop-up ads from partners and generally unnecessary gestures. Where is there to talk about saving time?
For example, fans of the Union Pay system, which functions perfectly on marketplaces, are well aware that in the Moscow metro you cannot top up the Strelka card with such a bank card through a vending machine.
If such a nuance is not taken into account in the process of switching to electronic payments of housing and communal services, will there not be an imposition of certain services on the population in this case?
Minus number 4
In fact, in Russia, the “voluntary-compulsory” transfer of Russians to electronic payments has been carried out for quite a long time.
Moreover, this is done, for example, in the Kolomenskoye district of the Moscow region, very simply — post offices in small settlements, in order to optimize, simply stop hiring postmen who must deliver paper receipts to the population.
Thus, people simply have no choice but to subscribe to the electronic notifications of the local EIRC — it is expensive to get receipts from villages and villages themselves.
Exactly the same thing is happening in other parts of Russia.
But if such a transition has been underway for more than one year, then why do we need a separate legislative initiative? Just to speed up the process? But perhaps nothing depends on its current pace in Russia as a whole.
However, as we can see, the deputies still insist on the adoption of a separate law regulating this process.
What for? Are they simulating violent activity on the ground? Or is there still some hidden nuance here?
However, this is already a topic for a separate big conversation with experts.
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