reform of control and supervision entered the final stage

Yesterday, at the “government hour” in the State Duma, the head of the White House staff, Dmitry Grigorenko, spoke about the control and supervision reform entering the final stage – ideologically, it is completed, and the government, which did not leave the inspectors the opportunity to work in the old way, is waiting for them to start doing it right by developing and applying risk indicators to prevent violations. This story, however, evoked a reaction among the deputies, which, it seems, was unexpected even for the official himself – in a round of questions and answers, he quite easily fought off the proposals of individual deputies of the State Duma to lift the moratorium on scheduled business inspections for the sake of opportunistic purposes, but was somewhat surprised by the amount of additional work , in which he was offered to participate in the State Duma – from protecting schools and kindergartens from fines almost to the reform of municipal and regional government and from the digitalization of the legislative work of the State Duma to restructuring the system of powers of the security forces in relation to entrepreneurs, by analogy with the CPV reform.

It was assumed that the “government hour”, which was held yesterday in the State Duma by the head of the government apparatus and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, will be devoted to progress in the reform of control and supervisory activities (KND), the implementation of which the official has been engaged in all recent years. Mr. Grigorenko’s report consisted of several large blocks and was intended to record that the process of creating a comfortable business environment by reducing the administrative burden on business is at its final stage. De facto, after the analysis of the regulatory blockages of the past years (“regulatory guillotine”, which canceled 143 thousand obsolete and redundant requirements with the participation of 43 industry working groups with parity representation of business), the adoption of clear rules for control and supervisory activities (FZ-247 and FZ-248 dated July 31, 2020, “On mandatory requirements” and “On state control”), settings for pre-trial online appeals against the actions of controllers (everyone is connected to the system – 31 federal, 1301 regional and 2501 municipal controllers, and the official admitted that he writes for himself complaints in order to check the functioning of the mechanism), moratoriums have, in fact, completed the reform of the CND. Until the end of 2023, the possibilities of inspections were sharply limited, which, according to the Deputy Prime Minister, in half a year led to a reduction in their number to an absolute minimum – by 40% compared to the same period in 2022 (when the moratorium was also in effect). The ban on scheduled business inspections will last until 2030.

As Dmitry Grigorenko repeatedly repeated, the inspectors simply did not have the opportunity to work in the old way (which cost the economy 200 billion rubles a year): the moratorium allows inspections of companies only in cases where the risk indicators developed by the inspectors confirm a high probability of violation of mandatory requirements. Now the White House is waiting until the realization of this will force the supervisory agencies to restructure their work, and count on competition among agencies: more accurate indicators will provide them with greater effectiveness of inspections, and recording the results in a single government cloud system (in the absence of the ability of controllers to correct data) will show both leaders and outsiders of this work. So far, however, 2.3% of inspections are carried out using risk indicators – the rest are simply withdrawn from moratoriums as critical, but the government apparatus insists that the process of setting up a new mechanism should be “evolutionary”.

It should be noted that the reactions of the participants of the “government hour” to the report on the government’s success in reforming the CPV were divided into two types – the success itself was not disputed by almost anyone. In a rather long round of questions from deputies and answers to them from the Deputy Prime Minister, there were often proposals to cancel the moratorium on inspections, for opportunistic reasons. Thus, the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Education, Yana Lantratova, asked whether it was possible to resume inspections of suppliers and food organizers in schools after cases of poisoning of children (including an incident with 36 children in kindergartens in Orsk). “Unfortunately, they cannot be caught by constant checks,” Mr. Grigorenko commented wearily. The same thesis was repeated in response to a question about the mass poisoning of citizens with methanol in cider: “By lifting the moratorium, we do not warn anything, by checking we fix an event that has already taken place. I think that the task is not to go around and fix these violations, but to make sure that they do not occur, ”the official insisted rather irritably, who has had to resist the attempts of controllers to return the “KND in the old way” for several years.

The second type of questions, however, seemed to surprise him, because it looked like an avalanche of deputies’ proposals to the vice-premier-reformer to now deal with other state problems as well. A vivid example of this was Dmitry Grigorenko’s conversation with State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who proposed protecting public schools and kindergartens from fines for violations, which, firstly, arise from underfunding from the budget, secondly, are paid to the budget, and thirdly – allocated from the same budget. Mr. Grigorenko recalled that the problem was de facto partially resolved (see Kommersant of November 17, 2022), it remains only to decide what to do with the array of fines for previous periods. But Mr. Volodin returned to the topic several times with the support of various deputies – and by the end of the conversation, it was almost a matter of reforming the system of budgetary relations, the need to punish officials who do not allocate money for eternally underfunded kindergartens and schools, and in general about that it is necessary to digitize and make transparent all financial flows in the state, and not just CND (the Ministry of Finance is working on this). This, however, did not end there: within half an hour, Mr. Grigorenko received demands to delimit the powers of the security forces, who occupy the niches left by the state control, issuing fines to entrepreneurs, to digitalize the legislative work of the State Duma, reform the “entrepreneurial” part of the Code of Administrative Offenses and a few more pressing issues – giving, however , to understand that most of these topics are clear to the White House and are “working on”.

“Kommersant” will follow the development of events.

Oleg Sapozhkov