This is what the Head of the Ministry of Economic Development said at the parliamentary hearings on the “Draft Law on Public and Municipal Control (Supervision) in the Russian Federation” developed by the Ministry of Economic Development. The hearings, that took place on October 19, featured about 250 members of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, representatives of business associations and executive branch agencies, as well as experts.
As one of the key innovations introduced by the new law, Maxim Oreshkin named the establishment of a fully-fledged system for risk identification and assessment. “Now the frequency of checks will be determined by the risk of damaging legally protected value,” the Minister explained. The first steps towards introducing the new risk-oriented approach have been already made. Among other things, the Government passed a number of decrees introducing the criteria and categories of risk for different types of control.
During his speech, Maxim Oreshkin emphasized the importance of systematizing and updating the compulsory requirements. According to Oreshkin, when checking the compliance with compulsory requirements, inspectors tend to focus on low-risk processes that don’t need to be closely controlled. “Another problem is that the requirements are too many and too complicated for organizations to deal with,” the Minister added.
To solve this problem, the new law establishes a system of preventive measures to make the compulsory requirements more clear. For example, control and supervision agencies will have to post on their websites the lists of statutory regulations prescribing the compulsory requirements. Furthermore, during compliance checks, inspectors will use check-lists with the most important and risk-oriented requirements.
At the same time, Oreshkin is convinced that occasional measures are not enough. As to the Minister, “the number of compulsory requirements covered by compliance checks has been growing for decades. The lists of statutory regulations and check-lists won’t be enough to reduce this number. We have more drastic measures in mind. For example, we could put a ban on checking the requirements adopted before 2010, i.e. before the procedure for assessing regulatory impact was introduced.”
Those in attendance at the hearings backed up the draft law pointing out that it managed to balance the interests of both entrepreneurs and inspectors and settled most of the fundamental disagreements.