On the issue of responsibility for the ineffective use of budget funds

The subject of the research is the social relations forming in the sphere of state financial control during the detection and prevention of offenses related to the violation of the principle of effective use of budgetary funds by entities of budgetary responsibility. The author thoroughly examines the issues of regulating offenses that fall under the definition of inefficient use of budgetary funds. As a result of the research, a problematic feature has been identified concerning the absence of a definition of inefficient use of budgetary funds in the current budgetary and administrative legislation of the Russian Federation. In this regard, at present, there have not been developed both theoretical and practical approaches to defining this term, nor has there been identified ambiguity in judicial practice regarding the accountability of individuals guilty of inefficient use of budgetary funds. The analysis in this research is applied when dividing the studied regulatory framework. The specific-sociological method was employed in the process of summarizing the practice of legal enforcement of state financial control in detecting inefficient use of budgetary funds. The formal-legal method allowed for the identification and examination of a number of legal definitions, classifying them and distinguishing between them. The main conclusions and scientific novelty of the study lie in the identified problematic feature of the absence of a legally established definition of inefficient use of budgetary funds within the framework of budgetary regulation and administrative legal regulation in the Russian Federation. The author proposes to supplement the norms of Chapter 30 of the Budget Code of the Russian Federation with a definition of inefficient use of budgetary funds, to highlight this norm as a budget violation, as well as to supplement the norms of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses and establish administrative responsibility for inefficient use of budgetary funds. These conclusions and proposals may have a positive impact on the effectiveness of holding accountable individuals guilty of inefficient use of budgetary funds, will allow for the alignment of judicial positions, reveal new theoretical approaches to the concept of violations in the financial and budgetary sphere as a whole, and to the concept of inefficient use of budgetary funds, in particular.