There is someone to look after – Newspaper Kommersant No. 235 (7436) of 12/19/2022

Sometimes the process of reading draft government documents reveals the underside of administrative reality: for example, at the end of 2022, in the fifth year of the reform that rebuilt the sphere of state and municipal control and supervision, the White House learned that not all control and oversight bodies are doing their job. It turns out that, based on the results of inspections, controllers limit themselves to issuing fines, skimping on issuing orders to eliminate identified shortcomings and checking their elimination, and the Ministry of Justice developed a bill to combat this evil, and the government submitted to the State Duma a bill – amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses on fines for negligent controllers.

The bill is very simple: to introduce into Art. 19.6.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (non-compliance by officials … with the requirements of the law on state control) new parts 4 and 5, where it will be written that failure to issue an order based on the results of an audit or “failure to fulfill the obligation to control its execution” will cost officials 3-5 thousand rubles ., and a repeated violation – 5-15 thousand rubles. with disqualification from six months to a year.

The question “Who will guard the watchmen?” (“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”), as Wikipedia teaches us, is first found in Nero’s contemporary Juvenal, and then repeatedly repeated in literature, more and more often as a rhetorical figure, and has no common answer: a hint of the futility of infinite recursion is enough . However, not everyone remembers it: the issue of punishments for those who do not impose fines on negligent controllers, and sanctions for those who do not punish those who should fine negligent controllers, the bill of the Ministry of Justice (yet) does not solve.

This could have ended, if not for one thing: the White House seems to have found the answer to the question of who will guard the watchmen, but so far they are not talking about it. The activity of the government apparatus in charge of the reform of control and supervision in the digitalization of this sector (the register of inspections under the control of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the system of pre-trial appeals through the public services portal of their results and in the near future the same system for complaints about denials of licenses and permits) is such that control robots of everything and everything, including the implementation of national projects and the achievement of national goals, is simply obliged to lead to the idea of ​​automating fines for all those involved in this. At the same time, the mechanism itself has already been worked out to perfection on drivers – technically, it will probably not be difficult to transfer it from driving to public administration.

Imagine a picture of how an inspector of some supervisory authority, having received a salary, opens the website of public services and sees: there are seven charges for payment from the GAS “Upravlenie”, parts 4 and 5 of Art. 19.6.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, 21 thousand rubles, and the links “pay” and “appeal”, and you understand that this is a fairly likely future.