Risk categories required supervision – Kommersant

The White House has prepared a new option for businesses as part of the reform of control and supervision – the ability to appeal online through the “State Services” the assignment of high risk levels to enterprises for the appointment of risk-based scheduled inspections. The White House staff, which oversees the reform of control and supervision activities (CND), by increasing the correctness and transparency of the appointment of such events, is counting on controllers to abandon the idea of ​​circumventing the moratorium by overestimating the risk category for companies of interest to them – the correct mechanism for such cases is to develop clear risk indicators for appointment of unscheduled inspections. At the same time, the authors of the reform intend to obtain from complaints transparent data on violations in the CND in order to clarify the directions for continuing reforms.

The White House has launched an opportunity for businesses and individuals to challenge the category of risk of violation of mandatory requirements assigned to enterprises. It is important when scheduled inspections are scheduled by control and supervisory authorities – their frequency depends on the risk category, and with an “overestimated” risk assessment, the business incurs an unreasonable excessive burden. However, due to the moratorium on all scheduled inspections, the original model of the risk-based approach has changed, and risk categories have remained unclaimed until recently. The situation escalated in 2023 after the partial lifting of the moratorium on business inspections – if previously scheduled inspections were canceled, now they can be carried out in relation to the two highest risk categories of controlled objects. The share of such facilities is less than 15% of the total number of companies. Denis Domashnev, executive secretary of the Delovaya Rossiya expert center for control and supervision, notes that disputes and contradictions in classifying persons as risk categories often arise, but in practice it is very difficult to challenge the decision of the supervisory authority to assign a risk category.

Marina Bludyan, First Vice President of Opora Rossii, explains that the risk category has now been determined for all controlled entities, it is determined by a special formula. If the entrepreneur does not agree with the calculations and the category assigned to him, then he can submit an application to the supervisory authority and challenge the appointment and checks due to the incorrectly assigned category and, accordingly, the assignment of the category. “Such a procedure is provided for by law and is effective in practice, but in some cases it may be necessary to turn to the government’s resource for pre-trial appeal,” says Ms. Bludyan. For example, an entrepreneur can dispute the appointment of an inspection due to an incorrectly assigned category and, accordingly, a risk assessment, but so far it has not been possible to directly challenge the category in this way.

Now, to submit an application for changing the risk category, a business will be able to use the already existing service for pre-trial appeal against decisions of regulatory authorities on the public services portal. The standard time for consideration of such an application is five working days. As an interlocutor familiar with the discussion of innovations in the government apparatus made it clear to Kommersant, part of the idea to introduce an online appeal of overestimation of risks is due to the desire of the reformers to force controllers instead to more carefully develop risk indicators that should be used to appoint already unscheduled inspections of “suspicious” enterprises. Also, the online appeal should provide the leaders of the CND reform and the controllers themselves with transparent and public data on what is happening between the supervisory authorities and business entities in order to promptly clarify areas for further improvement of the CND. As previously explained by the curator of the reform, the head of the government apparatus and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, the pre-trial appeal has become a source of feedback from business for the government – it is used in the White House to judge how innovations are implemented in practice and what improvements they require in the first place.

Oleg Sapozhkov, Diana Galieva