Legal safeguards of the municipal entities' Financial autonomy

The present article deals with some law provisions that exert direct influence on financial status of the municipal entities in Russia. With the help of technical method of research the author made a try to exhibit local authorities' reliance on managerial decisions of the state government bodies. Data submitted by the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation and All-Russian Council of Local Government have helped to reveal the most challenging problems of financial insecurity of local government on the whole and municipal entities in particular. The principles embedded in the system of accrual and distribution of subsidies and subventions do not leave a possibility for municipal entities to fulfill their obligations as it pertains to resolution of issues of local significance as far as accrual techniques are assigned to the constituent entity level, thus in actual practice subsidies and subventions come to be differently accrued in different territorial subjects of Russia. A widely acclaimed principle of local government autonomy is scarcely feasible when applied as the machinery of money receipt and distribution input into the legal tradition makes the local government almost directly dependant on the state government bodies. The municipal entities fail to shape the necessary budget independently for two reasons: low economic capacity of certain municipalities; adopted tax system and intergovernmental fiscal relations. Local problems grow in number while the amount of tax and non-tax revenues fed into the local budget inevitably drops.