The Ministry of Internal Affairs will prohibit punishing businesses for violations of mandatory requirements

The oversight reform implemented by the White House with the support of the Prosecutor General’s Office has gone beyond the government’s economic bloc. On behalf of the president, the police will be prohibited from punishing businesses for violations that fall within the competence of control and supervisory authorities. In the government itself, mass complaints from businesses against employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were not recorded, while the idea to limit the powers of colleagues in the power bloc belongs to the Prosecutor General’s Office. At the same time, business recognizes the gray activity of the police: due to a legal conflict, they can still apply sanctions against entrepreneurs outside the perimeter of the digital control and supervision system – in this case, the fines are higher, and the warning mechanisms provided for by law do not work.

Until October 2023, the government, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs must amend the legislation to exclude the possibility of police officers to punish businesses for violating the mandatory requirements that the state seeks to comply with as part of the control and supervisory activities (CND). This follows from the list of presidential instructions following the results of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

According to Kommersant, the idea to clearly delineate the powers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and control and oversight departments in relation to business belongs to the Prosecutor General’s Office, which de facto acts as a “forceful” support for the government’s reform of the CPV.

The White House has repeatedly noted the success of coordination and interaction between the supervisory body and the apparatus of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko in charge of the control and supervisory reform in ensuring its implementation by the regulatory agencies. This can be confirmed by the implementation on the side of the Prosecutor General’s Office of systems that ensure the information transparency of the reform: it is she who, we recall, controls the unified register of control and supervisory activities. Unlike intragovernmental interactions within the administrative vertical, where a bureaucratic game is possible that can slow down decisions that are undesirable for controllers, ministries and services take the requirements of the office of the Prosecutor General more seriously. The White House declined to comment, and the Prosecutor General’s Office did not respond to Kommersant’s request yesterday. The Ministry of Economy, responsible for the reform of the KND, said that they support the initiative to ban the police from punishing businesses, specifying that the Ministry of Justice has been appointed the lead executor of the order.

According to a Kommersant source in the government apparatus, a large number of business complaints were not recorded in the perimeter of the CPV reform. The interlocutor of Kommersant, who is familiar with the scheme of work of the White House and the Prosecutor General’s Office, explains that the delimitation of powers between the security forces and state controllers was necessary for the supervisory authority as part of expanding its own powers to limit the gray activity of employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Business, however, notes that the problem of the use by the security forces to put pressure on companies of administrative structures related to violations that fall within the scope of CND does exist, but is rarely documented within the current system of regulation of control and supervisory activities.

Ekaterina Avdeeva, head of the Delovaya Rossiya expert center for criminal law policy and enforcement of judicial acts, explains that the problem arose due to a conflict of norms.

The key law for the CPV “On State and Municipal Control” (248-FZ) determined the procedure for conducting control and supervisory activities in relation to business, but the current norms of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation and the law “On Police”, in conjunction with other legal norms, allow police officers to some extent replace the functions of supervisory authorities and bring businesses to administrative responsibility in case of detection of such violations.

The head of Opora Rossii, Alexander Kalinin, notes that the norms of the Code of Administrative Offenses regarding police officers and those checked according to mandatory requirements have lagged behind the updated control and supervisory legislation. “These atavisms create an opportunity for arbitrariness. The police can participate in inspections, but only the responsible supervisory authorities should impose sanctions for violations of mandatory requirements,” he insists. Delovaya Rossiya adds that the police must submit to the relevant supervisory authority materials on violations identified in the course of operational-search activities. “Violations that could remain out of sight of the control and supervisory agency due to the emphasis on a risk-based approach should not be ignored if detected, this seems wrong from the point of view of public danger. But verification and decision-making should be carried out by the relevant department,” believes Ekaterina Avdeeva.

Business Ombudsman Boris Titov considers the discussed legislative ban an initiative that can influence business here and now. He recalls that in recent years, the pressure of supervisory authorities on business has decreased, the number of inspections has decreased. “But if the control and oversight bodies, thanks to the new law on state control, are placed in a strict framework – all their activities are visible, everything is counted, most of them must be agreed with the prosecutor’s office in advance – then the police still have much more freedom to influence the work of business. It is in terms of violations of the Code of Administrative Offenses, real or imaginary,” he says. The participation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in control and supervision activities, meanwhile, contradicts the very idea of ​​a risk-based approach. “Now, according to most articles of the Code of Administrative Offenses, an entrepreneur, upon the first violation, can count on a warning instead of a fine, the fines themselves for small businesses have also been reduced. But if the punishment is imposed by the police, these norms do not apply and the burden on business is much higher,” explains Alexander Kalinin. Now, if there are no signs of a criminal offense, it will be forbidden to interfere in the activities of the enterprises of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Boris Titov states.

Diana Galieva, Oleg Sapozhkov