A day of four counts

On 11 November different Kazakh agencies announced new rules of accounting: for surplus oil in a pipeline, for dollars bought in a single day, for recipients of benefits and for electric cars. No single policy is visible behind this, since different bodies took the decisions. But they are worth reading together: in every case the state is clarifying what exactly it has on its books, and of whom.

Oil that was in the pipe anyway

Start with the most material. The Main Transport Prosecutor’s Office checked the accounting of oil on the Kenkiyak–Kumkol and Atasu–Alashankou pipelines and found that surpluses arising during pumping from technological features and measurement errors were not fully reflected in the books. Some headlines presented this as “unaccounted oil”, but the prosecutors’ statement does not speak of theft.

The mechanics are easiest to picture with a tape measure. Measure a pipe in two places and the numbers diverge by some small amount; over hundreds of kilometres and millions of tonnes that small amount becomes thousands of tonnes. The difference has to be recorded somewhere, otherwise the company’s assets are understated and the budget is short of tax. It was recorded: more than 92,000 tonnes were put on the books, 2.9 billion tenge of corporate income tax was assessed, and property tax with penalties brought the budget another 300 million or more.

Dollars counted by the day

The second count concerns currency, and here it is easy to get the scale wrong. Headlines about “control of large purchases” sound as if mandatory advance orders await everyone. In fact the ARDFM resolution is addressed to professional securities market participants and the central depository. If a client buys more than 3 million dollars (an individual) or 10 million (a legal entity) of non-cash currency in one operating day, further orders are accepted no later than a working day before the deal. Buying currency for securities, and operations of non-residents who have passed due diligence, fall outside the rule.

The threshold is expressed in millions of dollars per day, so the rule concerns large operations. To those who move such sums, the state says: submit your order in advance.

A benefit you can give back to the state

The third count is kept by the Ministry of Labour. The eGov Mobile app has a service for voluntary refusal of social payments, and next to it a well-being calculator that pulls cars, real estate, land and business stakes from state databases by itself. The ministry stresses that both services are only for benefit recipients, the calculator decides nothing, and refusal does not close the way back.

The refusal service politely informs those who receive no payments that they have nothing to refuse. But behind that politeness is a clear idea: the state wants support to reach those who need it and invites a person to check for themselves whether they are among them.

A green field

The fourth count is the most visible. By Interior Ministry order No. 831, separate plates for electric vehicles were approved: a white background, black characters and a green region field. There are, by statistical data, more than 24,000 electric vehicles in the country, whereas a few years ago they were counted in thousands. The Interior Ministry explained that separate plates will make it quicker to identify electric vehicles on the roads.

What they have in common and what they do not

What they share is the word “accounting”. Oil is put on the balance sheet, currency is counted by the day, benefit recipients are checked against databases, electric vehicles are marked by colour. The difference is also visible: the first two counts concern organisations and large sums, the other two ordinary people and ordinary things.

None of the reports says that the decisions are connected. So the conclusion is more modest than one would like: in a single day, on four fronts, the same work was going on, clarifying what is counted and by which rule. How accurate the new count turns out to be will be shown by the first reports and the first plates.