What is the damage, such is the assessment – Newspaper Kommersant No. 64 (7509) dated 04/13/2023

The White House continues to fine-tune the Regulatory Development Evaluation (RDA) mechanism – the government proposes to introduce a financial criterion for evaluating draft regulations containing mandatory requirements. The evaluation parameter will be the cost to the business of complying with the relevant regulations within six years from the expected date of entry into force of the documents. At the same time, attributing the project to a low degree of regulatory impact by the developer will require coordination with the relevant working group of the “regulatory guillotine” in order to prevent officials from “underestimating” the importance of such documents.

The Ministry of Economy has published on regulation.gov.ru a draft government decree that provides for new changes to the RIA procedure. The document was developed on behalf of Deputy Prime Minister and White House Chief of Staff Dmitry Grigorenko. The Ministry of Economy proposes to de facto introduce a financial criterion for determining the degree of regulatory impact of draft acts containing mandatory requirements. A high degree is provided for projects containing norms, the compliance with which within six years from the date of the proposed date of entry into force of the document will cost business more than 3 billion rubles, medium and high degree – for projects from 0.3 to 3 billion rubles. and less than 300 million rubles. respectively.

The proposal to link the degree of regulatory impact of the act and the costs of fulfilling mandatory requirements during the specified period is based on international experience, the explanatory note to the document says. It also notes that the thresholds are calculated on the basis of their relationship to the volume of GDP, taking into account similar foreign practice.

For projects with a low degree of regulatory impact, it is proposed to introduce a special procedure, which is likely to increase the objectivity and quality of the calculations made by the developer. Thus, the relevant assessments should be considered by the relevant working group under the subcommittee of the government commission on administrative reform (we recall that these groups carried out an “audit” of the entire body of regulation for the “regulatory guillotine”), and then by the Ministry of Economy itself. Coordination with the working group should become a guarantee of compliance with the new criteria for assessing the degree of regulatory impact of draft acts, believes Alexander Varvarin, vice president of the RSPP.

It should be noted that the draft resolution provides for a special procedure for the entry into force of the specified financial criteria – from February 1, 2024, which is due to the need to prepare federal executive authorities for new requirements.

The introduction of financial criteria should simplify their “sorting” for evaluation – and will allow paying special attention to acts with the greatest impact on business, and in the future – and create a database of costs, says Secretary of State, Deputy Minister of Economy Alexei Khersontsev. According to the agency, in 2022, 1,151 draft acts passed the RIA, and according to the results of the analysis, excessive requirements for entrepreneurs were identified in 345 of them. The total amount of identified potential business costs amounted to 500 billion rubles.

The RIA procedure itself was launched back in 2010 as part of reforms aimed at reducing administrative pressure on businesses. Such an assessment was mandatory for draft acts in the field of state control, the establishment of mandatory requirements for products, the safety of production processes and conformity assessment. Business representatives insisted on expanding the list by drafting acts related to tax policy and civil legislation. Since July 1, 2013, RIA has become almost universal – departments have become obliged to independently conduct RIA and publicly discuss not only their draft documents, but also the very need for their development. The Ministry of Economy also took up quality control and compliance with the procedure.

Experts criticized the RIA procedure for its often formal approach to assessment (see “Kommersant” dated September 28, 2021): public administration analysts noted that, according to the developers, in 99% of cases the new regulation does not threaten new costs for the state and business, although in fact, 70% of projects initially involve an increase in business costs. The formalism in the approach to RIA was then explained by its inability to block the adoption of an act that could cost companies dearly by the government (or a bill by the State Duma), but analysts pointed out that such an attitude calls into question the success of the control and supervisory reform and the work of evidence-based state regulation.

Subsequently, we note that the “loopholes” for projects that did not pass the RIA were consistently closed by the White House – in particular, by banning the Ministry of Justice from registering acts of ministries without resolving disagreements on RIA (see Kommersant dated September 12, 2022). This ban was part of a two-stage scheme to turn RIA into a mechanism that completely blocks regulations that are unacceptable to economic entities. Prior to this, in the fall of 2021, norms were introduced into the regulations of the government commission on administrative reform that stopped the adoption of bills and draft government resolutions with a negative ODS.

Venera Petrova, Oleg Sapozhkov