Business ideas for developing supervision showed themselves at the RUIE forum

Digitalization of control and supervisory activities (CSA) provides competitive advantages to honest businesses, and entrepreneurs insist on its expansion in the hope of further reducing the administrative burden and reducing costs when interacting with controllers, a discussion during the Russian Business Week at the RSPP showed. The government is also ready to digitally close the entire control cycle from identifying a violation to submitting a protocol on it to the court in order to improve the quality of management decisions in this area. However, the frontal implementation of this approach comes up against the problem of departmental readiness and their personnel and technological support. Controllers who have had difficulty accepting the ideas of a risk-based approach will need motivation to learn digital skills.

The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the Higher School of Economics and the Ministry of Economics have released an annual report “Control, supervisory and licensing activities in the Russian Federation” – unlike previous ones, in 2024 it is devoted not to the results of the CND reform, but to its prospects until 2030. The report was discussed at a specialized forum as part of Russian Business Weeks: its participants recognized the transition to a risk-based approach, the reduction of administrative burden and the effectiveness of new control tools as a reality, although back in 2023 they raised doubts (see “Kommersant” dated March 14, 2023 ). Deputy Head of the Ministry of Economy Alexey Khersontsev, who oversees the control and supervision sphere, noted yesterday that the system of risk indicators (mandatory for unscheduled control) has been launched: the activation of some in almost 100% of cases indicates the presence of violations. According to the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Alexander Shokhin, 20% of companies named excessive control and supervisory pressure among the main business problems in 2022, but in 2023 its severity has noticeably decreased – companies see CND tools as a way to protect fair business and ensure competition in the market.

According to Alexey Khersontsev, the development of CND will continue in this logic and expand: there will also be agreements on the elimination of violations by companies according to the “investments instead of fines” scheme (now controllers can impose new fines, but the comments will not be eliminated, since this requires investments). The Ministry of Economy also plans to further digitalize control and supervision. Now almost the entire process – from identifying risks in many areas to the inspection report – has been digitized, but the subsequent stages should also be transferred to “digital”, from drawing up a protocol on an administrative offense and appealing it to transferring it to court.

The RSPP report presented yesterday, in turn, contains four new vectors for the development of CND. Thus, business is interested in introducing a system of indicators of its effectiveness and efficiency: collecting and processing data on the basis of which it can be assessed is difficult, most departments do not have records of cases of harm. The authors propose introducing digital accounting for various types of control and additional mechanisms for assessing results where there is no obvious damage. There is also no specificity regarding the question of what legally protected values ​​are protected by this or that control, what harm can be caused and how to measure it. The RSPP also proposes to implement a “guillotine of fines.” Another request from companies is related to improving the system of mandatory requirements itself – the goal should not be to comply with them, but to achieve an “acceptable level of risk,” including by abandoning detailed regulation of company activities, since it lags behind modern practice. At the same time, the authors recognize the radical nature of the idea and offer an alternative – to prioritize the requirements, since some of them are relevant for a limited number of objects or situations.

Businesses are also counting on expanding the practice of digital control, invisible to business and citizens – it can reduce both the likelihood of errors or dishonest behavior of inspectors, and the costs of interacting with them. If until now digitalization has affected supporting processes (planning inspections, recording them), then in the future it is proposed to automate the process of assessing compliance with requirements itself. We are talking about remote inspections, AI-based “digital assistants” to help inspectors, monitoring compliance with requirements using the Internet of things and automated recognition services, as well as voluntary monitoring of controlled persons (similar to tax monitoring) – starting such experiments in the most mass and significant types of control.

The Ministry of Economy is ready to implement some of these proposals. However, the prospects for the development of the CND will obviously largely depend on the composition of the future government: the CND reform itself, after many years of discussion, de facto began to be implemented only under the technocratic government of Mikhail Mishustin, but it also runs into problems with personnel and IT support for controllers.

The curator of the CND reform in the government, Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Staff of the White House Dmitry Grigorenko, at a meeting with representatives of the business community (see “Kommersant” on January 27) already briefly answered questions about the future of this area: The White House, having achieved the formal development of indicators by departments the risk of companies violating mandatory requirements, will now fully focus on their content. Already, violations of mandatory requirements are detected in 52% of scheduled inspections and in 89% of “indicative” inspections. The final result of the reform in the White House is 100 percent effectiveness of indicators to guarantee the absence of inspections in companies operating without violations. However, the White House welcomes business ideas in this area and expects that its interest in fighting unscrupulous competitors will help controllers – proposals should be sent to the Ministry of Economy, which oversees the Control Committee, explained Kommersant’s interlocutor.

The issues of expanding the digitalization of control and supervision in Mr. Grigorenko’s office are considered “secure” – the higher the digital literacy of controllers and the harmonization of IT systems in regulated industries, the higher the efficiency of departments will be, so “the expansion of the digital contour of control and supervision directly corresponds to the interests of controllers.” , says Kommersant’s interlocutor. Let us recall that in general the idea of ​​competition among government agencies in efficiency is one of the basic principles for the reform.

Diana Galieva, Oleg Sapozhkov