Licenses and permits will be registered in government services

The experiment on simplified issuance of licenses and permits has been recognized as effective – the White House proposes to write it into law on a permanent basis. The bill has already been prepared by the Ministry of Economy (Kommersant has it) – it amends 61 laws on licensing and permitting regimes. Businesses positively evaluate the transfer of government services for issuing permits and licenses to electronic form. At the same time, entrepreneurs expect to expand the experiment, and also note the incompleteness and imperfection of electronic document management with the state – while it is convenient to contact government agencies, the preparation of documentation necessary to obtain licenses and permits often has to be done on paper.

The Ministry of Economy has developed a bill (Kommersant has it) that turns the experimental regime for the simplified issuance of licenses and permits into a permanent rule of law. “Piloting” of the new licensing and permitting procedure will end on December 31, 2024, while the Ministry of Economy’s bill should become law before September 1, 2024 and change the entire array of laws on licenses and permits.

The experiment to simplify licensing and permitting activities, launched in the summer of 2021 under the supervision of Deputy Prime Minister and White House Chief of Staff Dmitry Grigorenko, “grew” from the control and supervisory reform and the experience of using the “regulatory guillotine.” Its first stage ended on September 1, 2023, and the second is now underway (see “Kommersant” dated December 12, 2023). The introduction of obtaining licenses and permits to the government services portal and the reduction of excessive requirements for applicants were considered successful – and the extension of the experiment until the end of 2024 was caused by the need to consolidate decisions on reducing the time for issuing permits and the number of documents required to obtain them in the current regulatory framework. “During the experiment, in order to be able to issue permits in a simplified version, temporary procedures (optimized standards) are in effect, which lose their force upon completion of the experiment. Therefore, it is important to make changes to the laws before the end of 2024,” Dmitry Grigorenko’s office explained to Kommersant.

In total, from the beginning of the experiment until the end of 2023, the procedure for obtaining 426 permits, including 51 licenses, has been optimized. The average licensing period was reduced threefold, from 45 to 15 days, and the average number of required documents was halved, from 10 to 5. In the licensing area, the terms were reduced from 43 to 23 days, and the average number of documents required to obtain a permit was from 8 to 5. 43 federal departments and two state corporations participated in the experiment, the Ministry of Economy said. Along the way, the department optimized the range of government services provided: 13 permitting regimes and the requirement for 1,693 documents were canceled, four permitting regimes were transferred to the notification procedure.

“The bill… amends 61 federal laws and affects 426 permitting regimes. As a result of accelerating the issuance of licenses and reducing the number of documents required to obtain permits, we will reduce the administrative burden on business and rid it of unnecessary bureaucracy,” State Secretary and Deputy Head of the Ministry of Economy Alexey Khersontsev told Kommersant.

Obtaining permits (licenses) through a “one window” on the State Services portal is convenient, notes Deputy Executive Director of Support of Russia Ivan Efremenkov, expressing the hope that the regime will extend to regional and municipal permits and licenses. Business Russia also calls innovations a progressive step – however, they note that difficulties remain due to failures in the operation of programs, and the digitalization of the process of applying for a permit or license does not always go beyond its perimeter – and as a result, a significant part of the work remains paper-based. According to the executive secretary of the Expert Center of the organization for control and supervisory activities Denis Domashnev, “a number of services are associated with the preparation of a large number of preliminary documents, conclusions, examinations – their volumes can number hundreds and thousands of pages, which are almost impossible to scan and upload to the EPGU.” “Thus, on the one hand, the business has the opportunity to submit an application and receive services for the EPGU, but on the other hand, the main part of the procedure, for example, reviewing materials on paper, conducting examinations, making amendments to the documentation to eliminate comments, is carried out in the old fashioned way,” – he says.

Venera Petrova