MOSCOW. Sept 28 (Interfax-AVN) - The 2005 draft budget does not provide for higher wages of servicemen and personnel of Russian Interior Ministry bodies, a source in the State Duma administration told Interfax-Military News Agency Tuesday.
"According to the Russian Audit Chamber, the draft budget for 2005 does not provide for indexing the allowances of Interior Ministry servicemen with the account of inflation forecast. Moreover, the 20-percent increase of the wages of Interior Ministry civilian personnel is postponed until January 2006," he said.
The Audit Chamber thinks that the draft budget does not take into account additional compensations to Interior Ministry servicemen on alert duty, the source said.
Moreover, experts think that the federal budget should earmark 5.4 billion Russian rubles ($184.5 million) more for the program of weapons acquisition for the Interior Ministry Forces, within the background of insufficient funding allocated for this purpose in previous years.
According to Audit Chamber experts, the budget does not provide for enough money for deployment and accommodation of the Interior Ministry Forces in the North Caucasus.
At the same time, the expenses on national defense and law enforcement in 2005 amounted to 398.4 billion rubles ($13.63 billion). The expenses will grow by 26 percent nominally and by 15.4 percent feasibly as compared to those in 2004.
The growth of expenses in this section of the budget is first of all due to the 2005 federal armament program, and other tasks assigned by the Russian president and government.