Doubles of Rosreestr will be fined – Newspaper Kommersant No. 240 (7441) dated 12/24/2022

The government proposes to introduce administrative liability for the resale of information from the Unified State Real Estate Register (EGRN) and the creation of Rosreestr’s twin websites: for individuals, such activities can result in a fine of up to 25 thousand rubles, for legal entities – up to 400 thousand rubles. The need for amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses is explained by the inefficiency of the existing mechanisms for combating such violations and budget losses – the illegal income of one twin site is estimated by the authors of the project at 1.5–4.8 billion rubles. in year. Experts were skeptical about the initiative: the proposed amount of fines, with such a yield and low chances of finding a violator, is unlikely to be an effective preventive measure.

At a government meeting on Friday, a bill was approved establishing in the Code of Administrative Offenses administrative responsibility for the resale of information from the USRN to third parties and for the creation of Rosreestr’s twin sites – on the same day, the document was submitted to the State Duma. Such actions were prohibited by law back in 2021, but the authorities admit that the current methods of dealing with violators are ineffective.

According to the explanatory note to the project, from the beginning of 2020 to October 2022, Rosreestr identified 335 duplicate sites offering extracts from the USRN.

97% of them were eventually blocked, while seven such resources remain active – while new ones appear. “Sustaining the results achieved and the complete elimination of sites seems impossible,” the note said. The owners of the blocked resources register a new domain name, which is not covered by the court decision on blocking, and the lengthy procedure has to be started anew: at least six months pass from the detection of a violation to the consideration of the case by the court.

So the government decided to start preventing violations – according to amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses, the resale of data received from the USRN to third parties or the creation of a duplicate website can result in fines: for individuals in the amount of up to 25 thousand rubles, for officials – up to 50 thousand rubles, for entrepreneurs – up to 100 thousand rubles, for legal entities – up to 400 thousand rubles.

In the event of a repeated violation, the sanctions will be tougher: for individuals – up to 50 thousand rubles, for legal entities – up to 600 thousand rubles.

This amount of fines is explained by “the severity of the violation, a significant amount of proceeds received as a result of the illegal distribution of USRN information, the significance of the damage caused to the state and property owners.”

According to the calculations presented in the explanatory note (made on the assumption that 10-30% of the purchased access keys in the USRN are used by twin sites, as well as fees of 290 rubles for the most “popular” extract from the register – about the characteristics of real estate and rights to it) , the income of the twin site and, accordingly, the budget losses from non-payment of the state duty are estimated in the range from 1.5 billion rubles. up to 4.8 billion rubles. in year. The authorities also see risks in the illegal circulation of personal data, in the inaccuracy of information provided by twin sites, and overloading the FSIS EGRN due to continuous robotic requests from twins (about 7.5 thousand per day), which can cause problems or even refusal systems in processing requests from legitimate users.

Dmitry Kletochkin, a partner at the law firm Rustam Kurmaev & Partners, notes that the establishment of liability can increase the effectiveness of the fight against such sites, but does not guarantee the result in itself: network disruptions are not uncommon, for them the risks increase only in theory. Roman Lukyanov, Semenov&Pevzner Managing Partner, does not consider the introduction of fines promising: identification of a violation may be resource-intensive, while “it is not at all a fact that such a person will be a resident of Russia and live in the country.” The proposed amount of sanctions, according to him, taking into account estimates of the income of duplicate sites, “does not seem capable of effectively preventing such violations.”

Evgenia Kryuchkova