Corruption Counteraction in the Mechanism of Federal Public Administration: Federal and Inter-Regional Levels

Abstract

Current anti-corruption legislation is characterized by a lack of concentration and unity of legislative acts that regulate the work of public authorities and administration at the federal and inter-regional levels. The Federal Law «On Counteracting Corruption» has a framework nature and does not meet all the challenges of preventing and counteracting corruption that the Russian state now faces. Thus, the relevance of this study is obvious. The goal of the authors is to determine the key trends and means of systematizing legislation that regulates the anti-corruption activities of the state. Having analyzed a vast massive of normative legal acts on counteracting corruption at the federal and inter-regional levels as well as international experience, the authors conclude that it is necessary to amend the Federal Law «On Counteracting Corruption» by, among other things, systematizing the norms that regulate the corresponding sphere of state activities. The authors express their confidence that the effectiveness of legislation on counteracting corruption could considerably improve with the «package» principle of streamlining legislation and the introduction of a basic normative legal act — the Law on Counteracting Corruption, then changing the acts that are not in line with it and developing other normative documents to specify it. The use of a systemic approach to counteracting corruption also requires the revision and improvement of some clauses of the National Strategy of Counteracting Corruption which should incorporate the analysis of the situation with the anti-corruption policy of the state, the assessment of the effectiveness of the existing system, monitoring and audit, as well as the instruments of the anti-corruption policy. The paper also presents the authors’ position on the development and upgrading of the legal basis of organizing the public authorities and administrations at the central and inter-regional levels that regulates the specification and optimization of determining and delimiting jurisdictions in the sphere of counteracting corruption. The authors conclude that at present it is not advisable to organize a separate special corruption counteraction body in Russia because the conditions necessary for its establishment are lacking.