Illustration: AI
Kazakhstan’s Supreme Audit Chamber has identified more than 60.8 billion tenge in inefficiently planned and used business support funds. Financial violations accounted for another 6.2 billion tenge. The audit found declining tax returns from subsidies and problems with how programme outcomes were assessed (inbusiness.kz).
What happened
From 2019 to 2024, the government allocated around 4.5 trillion tenge to support entrepreneurship. The audit covered 824 billion tenge, with violations and inefficient spending identified within that amount.
One example was infrastructure for a soda ash plant planned by Pavlodar-Soda LLP. Around 2.5 billion tenge was allocated to utility infrastructure in the Pavlodar Region. The plant was never built, leaving the infrastructure unused.
The audit also found problems with export promotion programmes. More than half of the participants in the export acceleration programme in 2023–2024 were not actually exporting.
What this means
Tax returns from subsidies declined. In 2020, every tenge paid in subsidies corresponded to 5.2 tenge in tax revenue; by 2024, that figure had fallen to three tenge. This measures tax revenue relative to subsidies, rather than the amount of subsidies repaid.
The auditors linked the problems to poor coordination between government agencies and assessments that treated measuring results as a formality. Until recently, there was no single body responsible for business support policy.
Assessment was also hampered by differences in how the Ministry of National Economy and the Bureau of National Statistics defined businesses. This made it harder to establish how many enterprises the programmes covered and what results they delivered.
A survey of entrepreneurs through eGov Mobile revealed another problem: around 66.5% of respondents had not heard of non-financial support programmes. More than half said the assistance they received had had no effect on their business. They cited bureaucracy and a lack of information about available support tools as obstacles.
Read also: available tools for supporting exporters.
Following the audit, the Supreme Audit Chamber referred materials to law enforcement agencies. The government and relevant ministries were instructed to review registers of aid recipients, set obligations for businesses in exchange for support and create a single digital platform to track that support.
