During the reform of control and supervision, internal contradictions were revealed

During the reform of control and supervision, a problem was discovered that neither business nor the White House has a solution to yet – internal contradictions that arose due to repeated changes in the supervisors of the process. Outdated requirements for the progress of the reform are now giving rise to contradictory acts – for example, a draft White House resolution on transferring control of the administrative burden on the business of the service itself to Rostechnadzor has been published on regulation.gov.ru. This violates the principle “controllers should not check themselves” and creates a conflict of interest, but it fulfills the presidential decree signed under the initiator of the CND reform, Mikhail Abyzov. De facto reform needs the clearing of duplicative and contradictory norms about itself – business is ready to raise the issue of avoiding conflicts of interest of controllers in the working groups of the “regulatory guillotine.”

The reform of control and supervision has been underway in the Russian Federation since 2018 – this activity was started by then Minister for Open Government Affairs Mikhail Abyzov in the mid-2010s, continued and significantly improved in 2018–2020 by then head of the government apparatus and Deputy Prime Minister Konstantin Chuychenko, and his successor in these positions, Dmitry Grigorenko, is engaged in the final mixing and implementation in practice since 2020. The White House declares the principles of reform to be transparency in control and supervisory relations and avoidance of situations where regulatory authorities themselves regulate their administrative burden on business.

However, in the draft resolution published on regulation.gov.ru (prepared by Rostechnadzor), this principle was violated: it is assumed that the service will combine control and supervisory powers and calculation of the administrative burden on organizations in the field of industrial safety. According to the explanatory note, since 2019, the Analytical Center (AC) under the government has been assessing pressure in this area. However, at the end of 2021, the AC proposed to Rostekhnadzor to initiate amendments to the by-laws. The position of the AC was also supported by the government apparatus in a letter dated November 17, 2022. As the Analytical Center explained to Kommersant, the calculations were carried out there within the framework of the federal project “Digital Public Administration” and the state program “Economic Development and Innovative Economy”, but today these events are excluded from the program documents as completed and irrelevant. “It is inappropriate to carry out such a calculation only in the field of industrial safety,” the AC said.

Due to the concentration in one department of powers to control and assess the pressure of inspectors on controlled persons, a conflict of interest arises. As Kommersant found out following conversations with officials involved in regulating the CND, but who refused to talk about what was happening publicly until all the circumstances were clarified (in particular, the Ministry of Economy responsible for the reform refused to comment on the situation), most likely the conflict is the result of the accumulation of formally valid orders and instructions issued before the change of reform curators. In fact, this is confirmed by Dmitry Grigorenko’s office: they note that the transfer of the assessment to Rostekhnadzor is the implementation of the current presidential decree on industrial safety, signed during the time of supervision of the KND Mikhail Abyzov, and in the presence of a formal conflict of interest, in reality, alternative systems for assessing pressure on business are used. “In accordance with the presidential decree, the level of administrative burden on business in the field of industrial safety is calculated. The decision to transfer this function from the Analytical Center is technical and does not affect the assessment of the activities of controllers and the progress of the reform,” the White House asserts: alternative assessments of the level of this load are carried out at the sites of the Central Social Research Center, ASI, HSE and the Ministry of Economy and “allow us to obtain an independent view of the work of supervisory authorities, the results of the reform and make decisions on further steps.” Rostechnadzor itself also “at the current stage does not see a conflict of interest,” “planning in the new methodology for calculating the indicator to focus on objective data on the control (supervisory) activities carried out and their results, as well as information received from public control bodies and professional associations,” they said “Kommersant” in service.

Businesses, however, differ in their assessments of what is happening – and business associations see the risks of a conflict of interests in the situation. “In any situation of “self-control” and “self-esteem,” risks arise,” says Denis Domashnev, executive secretary of the Business Russia expert center for CND. The first vice-president of Opora Russia, Marina Bludyan, agrees with him. “The problem is that no one except Rostekhnadzor, including AC, has the data to calculate this indicator,” she points out. According to her, businesses will have to “take the situation into their own hands” and proactively consider topics on industrial safety in the specialized working group of the current “regulatory guillotine”; such experience already exists in the field of fire safety.

Oleg Sapozhkov, Diana Galieva