The Russian government is concerned about the low activity of permit recipients on the government services portal

The White House has completed ahead of schedule the plan to transfer the issuance of permits to the unified government services portal (UPGU) as part of the permitting reform, but is not yet satisfied with the result. Companies and individuals prefer to receive permits in paper form or through the websites of relevant departments, although the issuance of licenses under a similar reform was transferred to “Gosuslugi”. Due to the reluctance of businesses to use new services, the government apparatus lacks feedback to understand what to do next with the licensing area. At the same time, data from the Government Analytical Center confirms: under the control of the White House, the proportion of refusals and delays in issuing permits through the EPGU is noticeably lower than when applying for them directly to departments.

As Kommersant learned, the White House ahead of schedule completed its own plan to create a centralized service for issuing licenses and permits on a single portal of government services. “All types of licenses and permits included in the project (it was decided to digitize the most popular ones first.— “Kommersant”), are already available on the government services portal,” confirmed the government office (the project, we recall, is supervised by its head, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko). Now through the government services portal you can obtain more than 420 types of permits, including 51 types of licenses. To obtain licenses, the average number of documents has been halved, and the average issuance time has been tripled.

With the issuance of permits, however, the results are still more modest: the number of documents has decreased by 38%, the average period by 43%. The White House is also not completely satisfied with the progress of the reform; the demand for obtaining permits through the EPGU is low: according to the Government Analytical Center (AC), out of 2.6 million applications for permits in electronic form directly to the departments that issue them, only 2 were submitted .2 million (83%), through the EPGU – only 100 thousand (4%), another 12.2% of applications were paper. For comparison: when issuing licenses, out of 240 thousand applications, 54% are submitted through the EPGU. The situation is partly explained by the different nature of the documents: if for licenses there is a general law on licensing and the procedures for issuing them are similar, then there are about six hundred licensing regimes in the Russian Federation, and they are regulated by hundreds of federal and regional documents, which created problems for reformers when transferring them to the EPGU: its tools It was not always easy to adapt to the existing disparity, especially in the regional bureaucracy and IT.

The interest of the government apparatus specifically in applications submitted through the EPGU is explained there by the transparency of the service, integrated with the analytical system of control and supervision reform (from which the idea to simplify and digitize the issuance of licenses and permits grew). Technically, the White House could connect the information systems of licensing authorities to its analytical system or introduce a ban on obtaining permits, bypassing the EPGU, but due to the inconsistency in the design of IT systems, this would require the creation of hundreds of “gateways” (hundreds of regional ones are also involved in issuing permits government agencies), and the ban would infringe on business. Therefore, it was decided to support all possible ways of applying for permits, and then “win in the competition due to the quality and transparency of procedures at State Services.” Judging by the AC data, obtaining permits through the EPGU is indeed more effective. Thus, according to applications for issuing permits, there are practically no refusals or delays (0.3% of refusals versus 7.93% when applying directly to the government agency that issues them), which Mr. Grigorenko’s secretariat explains by procedural transparency and the knowledge of officials about the attention of the White House to the conclusion of permitting procedures at the EPGU.

Nevertheless, business is not yet very actively using new services – partly due to business customs, partly due to the need to master new procedures. AC, however, along with the list of departments to which, despite high permitting activity, there are practically no applications through “State Services” (Ministry of Health, Roszdravnadzor, Ministry of Agriculture, Rosselkhoznadzor, Rosprirodnadzor, Rostransnadzor, etc.), recommends that they “assess the current situation and analyze the reasons for the low demand use of the service on EPGU” and “take measures” to popularize it.

The White House needs data on the activity of permit recipients to decide what to do next with this area: “The project does not end here. The government apparatus, together with business (represented by working groups operating on the basis of the AC), continues to monitor the situation and is constantly improving both the procedure for obtaining permits and the service on the public services portal,” they say, recalling that they have already implemented, for example, a pre-trial service appealing the actions of the licensing authority – for now only for licenses, but by the end of the year the service will be extended to other licensing regimes.

Oleg Sapozhkov