Firsov Maxim V.

The article focuses on a thorough examination of the administrative and legal status of heads of territorial bodies of federal executive authorities, aiming to pinpoint institutional flaws and support modernization strategies. The article demonstrates the existence of an imbalance between the scope of officials’ powers and the extent of their legal liability, highlights the distortion of the institution of temporary performance of duties, and points to managerial risks arising from the processes of digital transformation in public administration. The author indicates the necessity of implementing a single hiring algorithm, increasing accountability for managerial inaction, reforming certification processes, and normatively combining the requirements for digital competencies to create a comprehensive and successful management model.

The study defines the main directions for improving approaches to performance evaluation for the heads of territorial bodies of federal executive authorities (FEAs). The author analyzes the shortcomings of the existing evaluation and performance criteria system and examines approaches to understanding the public administration efficiency by domestic and foreign scientists. The materials of the study offer ways for administrative and legal consolidation of performance indicators, as well as methods for their evaluation based on interactions of federal executive bodies with scientific organizations. The relevance of the study is defined by the existing gap between modern scientific achievements in the field of performance evaluation for public administration and the current administrative acts in this area. The objects of the study are administrative and legal norms governing the indicators for the effectiveness of the heads of territorial bodies, ways to assess them, the existing shortcomings of legal regulation, and ways to overcome them. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the idea of the client-oriented approach, which revises the approaches to evaluate the performance by replacing quantitative criteria of effectiveness with qualitative. The goal of the study is to introduce a scientifically based approach and improve the administrative and legal regulation of the existing system for evaluating the performance of the heads of territorial bodies of federal executive authorities based on a comprehensive legal, managerial and comparative analysis.

The article provides a periodization of the key public administration reforms that influenced the development of the system and structure of public authorities. The author examines the issues related to the distinction between the actual and formal-legal moment of emergence of territorial executive bodies of state power in Russia. Characteristics of the evolution of the system for public governance in tsarist Russia are presented. The article presents the criteria allowing to refer an authority to the territorial bodies of state power in the absence of relevant concepts in the legal terminology of the respective historical stage. The article aims to form a scientifically substantiated picture of the creation and development of the system for central state authorities and their territorial bodies in Russia in the period of XIV-XX centuries by using a comprehensive system analysis. Through comparisons of the key features characterizing modern territorial bodies of federal executive authorities and state institutions performing the functions of general and sectoral public administration in the administrative-territorial units of pre-revolutionary Russia, we can define their actual similarities. This refers to the function of representation of central authorities in the field, the presence of powers in the sphere of public administration, executive and administrative nature of activity, professional and sectoral division, and subordination to the central bodies of state administration.

The article deals with organizational and legal framework of recruitment, approval and appointment of heads of regional representative offices of the federal executive authorities. Despite many scientific articles and studies devoted to the activities of the headquarters of public authorities, aspects relating to the regional representative offices often remain outside the scope of attention. At the same time, it should be noted that in fact these are the regional representative offices that bear the bulk of the functionality of Federal state authorities. Taking into account this circumstance, the effective organization of the activities of regional representative offices, including the issues of improving the legal status of their heads, comes to the fore. The analysis of existing approaches to organizational and legal features of activities of heads of territorial bodies revealed a number of contradictions concerning the qualification requirements regarding the state service experience and work experience, level of education, the appointment approval procedure. Thus, the author comes to the conclusion that the place of heads of regional representative offices in the register of positions of the federal state civil service and, as a consequence, the qualification requirements imposed on them, do not correspond to the scale and complexity of the tasks that regional representative offices face. Also, attention is drawn to the different degree of complexity of the procedure for approval of the heads of the interregional and regional offices, and, despite the larger scale of activities in the case of interregional offices, the procedure for approval of their heads - is easier. The procedure for appointing heads of territorial bodies also has significant specificity depending on the departmental affiliation of the state body to the ‘socio-economic’ (governmental) or ‘administrative-political’ (presidential) bloc. One of the key conclusions of the research is that at the moment there is no uniform regulatory approach to the procedure of recruitment, approval and appointment of heads of regional representative offices of federal executive authorities.