On 5 November Minfin published order No. 131n of 1 September, registered with the Ministry of Justice on 3 November under No. 89034. It approves the forms of annual, quarterly and monthly budget reporting on the execution of budgets across Russia's budget system. The file runs to 229 pages: one page of order, 228 pages of forms.
It is the document we said was missing six days ago.
The order
The text is three clauses long. It is issued under paragraphs thirty-one and forty-six of article 165 of the Budget Code. Clause 1 approves the forms according to the appendix. Then:
“2. This order shall be applied in compiling budget reporting, starting with the budget reporting for 2027.
3. This order shall enter into force on 1 January 2028.”
That is the same pair of dates, in the same order, as the forms published for the other half of this reform. The signature is not the one on the repeal: order No. 131n is signed by I. A. Okladnikova as acting minister, while order No. 134n was signed by Anton Siluanov as minister.
What we said was missing, and what the register says now
On 31 October we reported that order No. 134n repeals instruction No. 191n of 2010 — the document governing how reporting on budget execution is compiled — together with twenty-eight amending acts, from 1 January 2028. Its twin that day, No. 133n, did the same to the equivalent instruction for institutions, and that half already had its replacement forms, published two days earlier. Ours did not. We wrote then that the repeal named no successor and that we could find no order approving forms of reporting on budget execution, and we established that absence the slow way, by listing the 290 acts Minfin published on the portal across 2025 and 2026 and reading the titles.
The gap in the register was real, and it is now closed. A search today for the exact wording of its title returns one act in the portal's entire register — this one, published on 5 November.
The dates make the sequence of the reform plain. Order No. 131n is dated 1 September, the same day as order No. 130n, which contains the institutions' forms we found already published. The two repeals, Nos. 133n and 134n, are both dated 8 September. The four orders were signed as two pairs a week apart and reached the public register across nine days — 28 October, 30 October and 5 November — in an order that made the first arrivals look incomplete. What we described on 31 October as a pattern rather than a stated plan is now four documents that fit together.
The half nobody could read
The other open question was the standard above both instructions. On 31 October the portal's file endpoint served us only the first page of order No. 179n, which approves the federal accounting standard for public finances “Budget reporting”. This session it served 42 of the document's 88 pages, and the relevant ones are near the front.
The order's own clauses set two different dates:
“2. This order shall enter into force on 1 January 2027.
3. To establish that the Standard shall be applied in compiling budget reporting, starting with the budget reporting for 2026.”
And the standard states what it governs:
“The Standard establishes mandatory requirements for the composition, content and procedure for forming the information disclosed in budget reporting, for the composition of the last and first budget reporting upon reorganisation of a state institution, for the composition of the last budget reporting upon liquidation of a state institution, for the composition of interim budget reporting.”
Composition, content and the procedure for forming the information: that is the half of instruction No. 191n that is not a form. So the one instruction has become two documents — a standard that says what goes into the reporting and how it is assembled, and a forms order that sets out what it looks like on the page.
The switchover is staggered rather than simultaneous. The standard applies from the reporting for 2026, the new forms from the reporting for 2027, and the old instruction is repealed from 1 January 2028. Read in sequence those dates leave no gap: the old instruction stays in force through the whole of 2027, which is when reporting for 2026 is compiled and published. It also means the first reporting year governed by the new standard is the one now ending.
The forms our numbers come from
The appendix is 228 pages of scanned forms with no text layer, and we did not read all of them. We read the order, the first forms in the appendix, and the two forms that matter for the series on this site.
Form 0503117, “Report on budget execution”, is at pages 5 to 9 of the file, and we read all five of its pages. It keeps its code and its three sections: 1. Budget revenues, opening on line 010, “Budget revenues – total”; 2. Budget expenditures, opening on line 200 and closing on line 450, “Result of budget execution (deficit/surplus)”; and 3. Sources of financing the budget deficit, with line 500 for the total, 520 for internal and 620 for external sources, and lines 700, 710 and 720 for the change in balances. Its periodicity is given as monthly, quarterly and annual. The columns are the familiar four — budget classification code, approved budget allocations, executed, unexecuted allocations. The form's header contains fields the reader of the published monthly file never sees, among them the subject's status, an INN, an OKVED code, the method of organising accounting, and a document type marking an original return “0” against revisions “1”, “2” and so on. Two further pages, numbered as pages 4 and 5 of the form itself, carry a table of control ratios keyed to the form, thirty numbered rows with a column for the result of applying each one.
Form 0503317, the report on execution of a region's consolidated budget and of its territorial state extra-budgetary fund, is at pages 150 and 151. It also keeps its code and its periodicity, and it keeps the breakdown that makes it useful: separate columns for the consolidated budget of the region, the regional budget itself, the budgets of municipal districts, urban districts, urban districts with internal division, intra-city districts, municipal areas, urban settlements and rural settlements, and the extra-budgetary fund — each with its own approved and executed figures, and columns for the sums to be eliminated on consolidation.
Those two forms are where our readings come from. Russia's budget deficit stands at 3.2% of GDP on a rolling twelve months — 7.34 trillion roubles — and scores 66 of 100 against a pre-war anchor that is itself a surplus, 0.34% of GDP in 2021, and a registered trouble line at 10%. Russia's regional budget balance is a deficit of 1.466 trillion roubles, scoring 33 of 100 against a 0.661 trillion surplus at the end of 2021 and a trouble line at a 2.5 trillion deficit. Oil and gas revenue, which scores 10 of 100, is read from lines of the first of those two forms. Nothing in this order moves any of them: no reading changed in this morning's run, and the strength index stands at 46 of 100, in the stress zone.
What this does change is the answer to the question we left open. On 31 October there was no way to tell whether the figures either side of 1 January 2028 would be the same figures, because the document defining them after that date did not exist. It exists now, and on the evidence of the two forms we read, the central lines survive the change: the same form codes, the same sections, the same deficit line in the same place. That is not a guarantee that every series holds. It is limited reassurance from an appendix of 228 pages that we have not read in full.
What we do not know
What else is in the appendix. We read 11 of the 229 pages: the order, forms 0503110 and 0503111 at the front, all five pages of form 0503117, and the first two pages of form 0503317. What other forms the appendix contains, and which of the current ones it drops, we did not establish.
How the new forms differ from the ones in force. We did not put the new form 0503117 side by side with the version prescribed by instruction No. 191n as amended. The header fields and the bound-in control ratios described above may be new or may already exist; we are describing what the new form contains, not what has changed in it. The same applies to form 0503317.
Whether a separate instruction is still coming. None has been published; the register, searched on the instruction's own title, still returns nothing after order No. 134n. Our reading is that none is needed, because the standard covers composition and procedure while the forms order covers the forms. That is a conclusion from reading the two documents' statements of scope, not something any published act says.
Whether the staggered dates are deliberate. The sequence works, and we have set it out from the dates in the three orders. No published act we read explains the sequencing or calls these four orders one programme.