The moratorium on inspections includes reservations

During the presidential Council for the Development of Local Self-Government, Dmitry Grigorenko, head of the government apparatus, who oversees the control and supervisory reform, announced several possible changes in the rules of the game at the municipal level. One of them may be the partial lifting of the moratorium on inspections of businesses by municipal authorities – while ignoring the instructions received as a result of preventive visits of inspectors. The second may affect the municipalities themselves and their officials – now restrictions on business inspections do not apply to inspections of their actions, which seems unfair to the authorities.

The White House can go along with the wishes of the municipal authorities, expressed yesterday during the President’s Council for the Development of Local Self-Government.

First of all, we are talking about the partial lifting of the moratorium on inspections, introduced as part of the government’s anti-crisis work to support business.

As Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Staff of the Government Dmitry Grigorenko, who oversees issues of state control and supervision at the White House, said in his speech, the introduction of a two-stage procedure is being discussed, under which, in the event of obvious violations by businesses of mandatory requirements, controllers will make preventive visits to companies and issue instructions to eliminate violations – but without fines and sanctions.

In case of ignoring the instructions, they will already be able to apply punitive measures – for this, amendments are being discussed to government decree No. 372 of March 10, 2023, by which the moratorium on scheduled business inspections was extended until 2030 (see Kommersant dated March 20).

The second innovation in the field of control and supervision activities may be the extension of the restrictions of the law on state control to the municipal bodies themselves and their officials – now business control rules do not apply to checks of their actions, which leads to the issuance of fines, which, in fact, the state is forced to pay itself – from the municipal level of the budget system to the regional or federal. However, whether the law on state control or the law on local self-government will be changed for this is yet to be discussed.

It should be noted that the council members also raised the issue of “writing off” the fines already imposed on municipalities, but Anton Siluanov, head of the Ministry of Finance, who took part in the council meeting, also spoke out against it.

According to him, such a decision would be “unfair” in relation to other economic entities and citizens. As an option, the head of the Ministry of Finance suggested creating commissions at the regional level that would be authorized to audit the already imposed sanctions and cancel the “unfair” ones.

Oleg Sapozhkov