Acts that escaped the “regulatory guillotine” must be reissued before September 1, 2025

Departments are preparing to complete the work of the “regulatory guillotine”, which is part of the reform of control and supervisory activities (CSA). The Ministry of Economy proposed that the government set September 1, 2025 as the deadline for re-issuing regulations from the so-called white list – a list of 1,275 outdated documents that escaped cancellation or revision under the “guillotine.” Five hundred acts from this list have already been reissued, and for the remaining ones, a revision period of one and a half years has been proposed. Business welcomes the initiative, noting that as a result of the reissue, the mandatory requirements should not change in the direction of tightening.

The Ministry of Economy has prepared a draft government decree (Kommersant has it) on the revision and re-issue of regulatory (legal) acts from the “white list” by September 1, 2025. We are talking about documents containing mandatory requirements for business, which for various reasons have escaped the “regulatory guillotine” and should be gradually replaced by new ones. The government approved a “white list” of 1,275 acts at the end of 2020. More than 500 documents from it have already been republished; for the remaining ones, the Ministry of Economy proposes to set a period of one and a half years for systematic reissue.

Let us remind you that the “regulatory guillotine” is part of the reform of control and supervision and is designed to reduce the administrative burden on business. This mechanism involves the cancellation and, if necessary, reissue of government and departmental acts, acts of the Soviet period that came into force before January 1, 2020 and do not meet modern realities. In addition to establishing a deadline for reissue, the draft of the Ministry of Economy provides for the exclusion from the “white list” of a small number of acts that are not related to the subject of the CND or have already been actually reissued.

“The draft resolution concerns requirements that did not fall into the “regulatory guillotine” due to the fact that industry working groups (mainly consisting of business representatives.— “Kommersant”) a decision was made on the possibility of extending their validity. With this decision, the government is actually completing the “guillotine”, returning to the deferred norms and working them out in the general logic of the reform,” the office of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko explained to Kommersant.

Deputy Head of the Ministry of Economy Alexey Khersontsev told Kommersant that the project was developed to reissue open-ended regulations that “are critically important for the regulation of a particular area and therefore must be updated taking into account current political and economic conditions.” According to him, the deadline until September 1, 2025 was set taking into account the opinions of interested parties – project developers and businesses.

The RSPP supported the intention to set an expiration date for the “white list” acts. Its absence created uncertainty regarding the prospects for adjusting mandatory requirements that were not changed during the “regulatory guillotine,” says Alexander Varvarin, vice president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs for legal regulation and enforcement. According to him, the adoption of the resolution will encourage federal executive authorities to more actively and together with business revise acts from the list, eliminating outdated and redundant requirements.

According to the Business Russia expert center on CND, the revision of the remaining acts is a logical continuation of the government’s large-scale work to update legislation, and in this regard, business can only welcome this work. The update will affect acts of key departments, including Rospotrebnadzor, the Ministry of Transport, and the Ministry of Natural Resources. “But this work should be streamlined from the point of view that the rules of the game should not change like an avalanche, and most importantly, when revising acts, they should not change in the direction of tightening,” the business association noted.

Venera Petrova