About 25% of regulatory acts are illegal in Ukraine. The head of the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) Oleksiy Honcharuk informed the community about that during the presentation of the Rolling Review’s first results.
In January 2016, the BRDO experts launched a systematic review of regulatory legislation by using a special Rolling Review’s method providing the analysis of existing regulatory acts on clear criteria that don’t have double interpretation: legality, practicability, corruption risks, ease of doing business, regulation costs and its efficiency.
In Oleksiy Honcharuk’s words, 117 regulatory acts were analyzed on the criterion of legality during the first month of their work. The BRDO experts found 33 illegal documents among them.
“According to our preliminary estimations, about a quarter of regulatory documents existing in Ukraine have been adopted on the basis of voluntaristic decisions of officials and don’t fit in the legislative model,” Honcharuk said. All research data will be sent to the State Regulatory Service to obtain appropriate responses.
Another important finding of the BRDO experts is that the efficiency of a regulatory act can be figured out only in 7-8% of cases.
“The problem is that in most cases it is impossible not only to estimate the efficiency of regulation, but even to reliably ascertain what goal a regulator pursued when imposing rules or restrictions for business. 7-8% is a diagnosis that should be realized and factored into treatment order,” Honcharuk said.
According to him, the Better Regulation Delivery Office BRDO works closely with the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine and the State Regulatory Service of Ukraine, and the analysis conducted by the Office will be taken into account in the regulators’ work.
As anyone can analyze regulatory acts along with the BRDO experts at the official website, Oleksiy Honcharuk called on the public and businesses to get involved in the process of refining the legislation and review important acts by using Rolling Review’s methods.
In addition to above mentioned criteria, another filter for documents is their compliance with the Free Trade Area Agreement DCFTA. This is necessary in order to protect the documents approved to fulfill current international obligations of Ukraine.
The BRDO should give a primary review to regulatory acts in five sectors (agriculture, construction, energy industry, transport and infrastructure, control and supervision) during the year. Priority of their review is defined with the participation of business representatives. Based on this analysis, some regulatory acts are proposed for removal or improvement.
As a reminder, regulatory frameworks have been reviewed by certain criteria in the following countries: Vietnam, Mexico, Kenya, Moldova, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro. As a result of this review, from 7 to 77% of regulations were simplified and from 8.8 to 68% were canceled in these countries. At this time, the economic benefits on average amounted to 1.4 billion dollars saved annually.
The BRDO experts expect that the effect of this reform in Ukraine will be similar to the international practice.