And almost simultaneously, the Labor Department rolls out the details of the updated digital wealth calculator. That is, the “digit” has already packed all of us into shelves. Such coincidences in financial policy are not accidental.
Survival Alphabet: Five New Castes
The essence of the reform is simple as an accounting record: the state no longer believes paper certificates, tears in akimats and complaints about expensive potatoes. The Digital Family Map, a giant electronic aggregator that uploaded data on all 20.6 million citizens of Kazakhstan, is now in charge.
We were divided into 6.2 million household cells, and each was assigned a letter of the Latin alphabet from "A" to "E". And not statistical is fun, but a strict cut-off from the budget pie.
The top of this pyramid is the category “A” – high level of well-being. Here the system records those whose income exceeds seven subsistence minimums for each member of the household (this is more than 350 thousand tenge per capita), there are luxury cars, operating business and spacious housing over 120 square meters per person.
A little lower is the category "B" - wealthy citizens. They have stable jobs, incomes well above the poverty line, a couple of liquid assets behind them. From 2027, these two groups will officially cut off access to 14 types of state benefits and payments.
Then begins the most interesting for the budget. Category C is the so-called satisfactory level. According to the logic of the standard developers, these people themselves cover their basic needs: they have a roof over their heads, some kind of salary, and perhaps an old car or an outstanding consumer loan. They don't have state support. Nothing at all.
Below are levels of survival. Category D: Crisis or economically vulnerable. Low wages, underemployment, overdue debts, dilapidated walls. This is where the recipients of targeted social assistance (ASP) live. But it is now given with a rigid ultimatum: every able-bodied person is obliged to register with the labor mobility center and agree to the proposed job. If you refuse, the payments will be withdrawn.
And at the bottom is category "E" - emergency. This is extreme poverty, a complete lack of legal income, severe disability, no angle of its own. Only this group remains the unconditional recipient of state guardianship without further questions.
Scoring Anatomy: 59 Control Points
How does a soulless machine decide which letter to define you? Very simple and without the slightest involvement of a living inspector. The algorithm runs each household monthly through a filter of 59 indicators drawn from more than thirty state databases from the tax and interior ministry to bank bureaus and notaries.
All 59 markers are broken into eight dense blocks. First of all, the robot scans the wallet: official per capita income, regularity of receipts to accounts and pension contributions. The second step is to check the debt pit - the presence of active bank loans, microloans and especially delinquency over 90 days.
Financial analyst Arman Toktagulov assesses this architecture without illusions: “The Ministry of Labor copied the classic banking scoring, only turned it inside out.” The bank is looking for a reason to give you money at interest, and the state algorithm is looking for a legal lead to prevent you from giving government money.
The third and fourth blocks are property audits. Every passenger car, truck, tractor or trailer listed in police databases is counted. In parallel, square meters of apartments and houses are summed up according to justice data.
But the fifth block is specially sharpened for the countryside and suburbs: the algorithm sees land plots for IZHS or personal subsidiary farming, cottages, agricultural machinery and even livestock in the database of animal identification. Every cow or sheep is a recorded asset.
The sixth and seventh circuits capture business activity. The presence of an individual entrepreneur, an inactive LLP, commercial real estate or simply the status of an able-bodied person without official pension contributions. If the arms and legs are intact, but the UAPF is empty, you are not a poor person for the system, but a suspicious element that hides income. The eighth block records medicine and dependents: the number of children, disability, severe diagnoses and status in the CSHI system.
The machine grinds these numbers automatically. The human factor is excluded. Changed jobs, bought a broken trailer or closed the loan - the next month your index was recalculated and silently moved from one category to another.
Hole in the treasury: the price of optimization
Why is the government suddenly so concerned about digital filtering? The answer lies in the Treasury’s dry tables and the economic bloc’s revelations. Money in the treasury is simply not enough.
For nine months of this year, the state budget deficit broke the mark of 3 trillion tenge. It's a giant box office gap. At the same time, the cost of servicing the public debt, that is, simply paying interest on old loans, came close to the astronomical 2.8 trillion tenge.
Think about this proportion: we give more to creditors on interest alone than we spend on all the health care and utilities of the country combined.
Previously, such holes were easily flooded with money from the National Fund. But now the government is driven into tight budget rules and forced to reduce transfers from the oil pot. Attempts to quickly collect more taxes are met with deaf opposition from business and society, with the fierce debate surrounding VAT hikes or total controls on mobile transfers. Fiscal mobilization is stalling.
When incomes do not grow and debts are crushed, the Cabinet has only one lever - to cut spending. The law explicitly prohibits cutting basic pensions and disability benefits. So the rest of the social network is under the knife.
At a briefing on October 14, Serik Zhumangarin tried to reassure the public. The reduction of social spending from 10.7 to 10.5 trillion tenge is not a sequestration at all, but a subtle “optimization of the redistribution of resources.” The official version is as follows: the financing of primary health care (polyclinics) was simply transferred from the guaranteed amount of free medical care (which is paid directly from the budget) to the CSHI system (which lives on the contributions of employees and employers).
But economics cannot be fooled by verbal equilibristics.
When the government reduces nominal social spending by 200 billion tenge at double-digit real product inflation, it means a tight squeeze on government support in purchasing power. Shifting the costs of clinics on the shoulders of the health insurance fund is just a way to unload the republican budget at the expense of the pockets of working citizens, Arman Toktagulov explains.
Category "C" trap: rusty "Passat" vs benefit
Here we come to the main cause of public nervousness.
Public promises by officials to deny payments to the rich in categories A and B work like a classic smokescreen. Let me be frank: the owners of mansions and luxury SUVs do not live on targeted assistance of several thousand tenge. The budget won't save you anything.
The real multi-billion dollar savings of the treasury are made on a thin line between categories D and C.
Category C is becoming the main trap of this reform. Reports call it "satisfactory," and in practice it's a huge gray area of working poverty.
Take a typical situation in a region or on the outskirts of a metropolis. People's incomes are penny - close to food and communal. But in the database of the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the head of the family hangs the 1993 Volkswagen Passat or the old Soviet UAZ.
In the village without these rusty wheels physically do not survive – they carry coal, canals with water, deliver children to school. It is impossible to sell this scrap metal for normal money. However, for the 59-factor calculator of the Ministry of Labor, this is a registered vehicle unit. Plus a share in an old privatized parent apartment or a samana house. Plus two milk cows in the Ministry of Agriculture database.
The algorithm adds up these “assets” and cheerfully delivers a verdict: category “C”. Basic needs are closed, property is available, the state does not need assistance. The fact that a cow does not give cash to buy winter shoes in October, and an old car requires spending, not paying dividends, the database does not care.
Even worse, if twenty years ago a person sold a jiguli by handwritten power of attorney, the buyer disappeared, and the car remained hanging in the database of the traffic police. Prove to the system that you are not a camel, will have a long and painful, wrapping the thresholds of special centers and ships.
The second front of the strike is directed against a giant army of self-employed. Millions of Kazakhstanis turn in the informal sector: private transportation, minor repairs, seasonal harvesting, hand trade.
The calculator sees a able-bodied citizen, sees some square meters of housing, but fixes zero in the column of pension contributions. The logic of the state here is this: either come out of the shadows, register, pay taxes and contributions to the CSHI, or your cell is automatically deprived of the status of vulnerable. There are no discounts on the fact that there is simply no legal work in a depressed area, the digital matrix does not.
The biggest danger lies in the fact that high-tech Big Data scoring was built on top of a deeply archaic methodology for calculating the subsistence minimum. Our poverty line is still detached from the real price tags in bazaars and supermarkets. As a result, the ideal digital scalpel cuts on the curves of ancient patterns, throwing overboard hundreds of thousands of people who live from salary to microloan, said Arman Toktagulov.
People are angry not because they are used to dependency, but because of double standards: the state demands absolute transparency from citizens to a penny, counts every chicken in the barn and every square meter in the Khrushchev, but at the same time manages to bring the budget to a state where almost 3 trillion tenge goes simply to repay interest on debts.
Digitalization of the social sphere is inevitable, and from the point of view of dry management is quite logical. The treasury is not bottomless, giving money to everyone in a row will no longer work. But when, under the guise of a pinpoint adjustment of aid, the government simply plugs budget gaps at the expense of the most vulnerable layers of the border zone “C”, confidence in such arithmetic drops to zero.
