Source: Delo.ua
On November, 3, the Verkhovna Rada adopted as a whole the Draft law #2418a on the liberalization of the state supervision that changes the approach to business inspections in Ukraine during its session. Law provisions look pretty friendly towards the business, significantly limiting controllers.
The draft law adopted today in the Parliament had lied too long, if we can say so. It was introduced more than a year ago, in June, 2015, and the first reading was held in November. However, the deputies could not come for a common position according the final reading of the draft law, and in April of 2016, it was passed to the second reading, although only five votes were lacking for the positive decision.
What will be changed in the inspections?
According to experts, the Law on the liberalization of state supervision is aimed primarily at reducing a business burden, offences prevention and supporting the predictability of inspections.
“To my mind, one of the most important innovations is a fact that the law covers the spheres it has never been focused on. We speak about such important spheres like compliance with the requirements of nuclear safety, compliance with labor law and employment, state supervision in civil aviation, architectural and engineering and fiscal control. So, the common rules for practically every regulatory body affecting the business will be created,” the Head of the Market Surveillance Sector of the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) Volodymyr Holovatenko stated.
However, the law will not cover the foreign currency control, customs control on the border, the state export control, the control of the budget legislation compliance, bank supervision, the control of compliance with the legislation protecting the economic competition.
Also, during the discussion of the draft law, the people’s deputy Yuriy Levchenko insisted on excluding the architectural and engineering control from the law. The Law requires inspecting the entities with high risks biennially. According to the deputy, the Law will not allow preventing the illegal constructions.
Predictability of inspections
The adopted document clearly prescribes the terms of formation of an inspection plan and the duration of every control activity, its beginning and end.
Thus, the companies and self-employed individuals that should be verified by state controllers during next year must be defined before October 15, every year. The inspection plan must be published on the Regulatory Service’s website before November 15, and the full plan of control measures for each entity must be approved and published before December 1.
As for the inspection duration, there is a step forward to the business. According to Volodymyr Holovatenko, the amount and duration of inspections are reduced twice. For example, the law did not limit earlier how many working days all control measures for one entity could summarily last during the year. After the enactment of the law, the whole amount of inspections per year must be limited by 30 working days, and 15 working days for micro and small enterprises. In addition, every measure can last till 10 work days in the future, and 5 days for micro and small enterprises.
Another innovation of the law is an obligation of a regulatory authority to publish the unified forms of acts before the inspection. And the entrepreneurs, in turn, found the possibility to refuse the controllers in the inspection if they did not perform this.
“A unified form of act is a kind of check-list, with which the controller comes to the enterprise. Earlier the regulatory authorities were not obliged to publish them, and that is why the questions, on which the business generally had the right not to answer, might appear in these check-lists. Previously, the controllers could abuse during the state supervision. Now the business will be able to refuse the inspection if the controller asks something that is not in the check-list,” the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) expert said.
As before, the control body will be obliged to inform business entities about future inspections at least 10 days prior. However, earlier, it was necessary to deliver a registered letter or a telephone message personally to a manager or an authorized person. From now on, it will be possible to inform about the inspection via email. In this case the entrepreneur reserves the possibility not to allow the controller to inspect if his visit was not preceded by a warning.
A Single Inspection Database
During the year after the enactment of the draft law, it will be necessary to create an integrated automatized inspection system. The information about legal entities and self-employed individuals, types of economic activities subjecting to state supervision, annual plans for control activities, completion reports etc. will be stored in this system. In this case, the access to the information of this system is public and free via the Internet. Ant the system will be integrated with the regulatory authorities’ databases.
The State Regulatory Service has to ensure the creating and functioning of this system and will be its owner in the future. A government enterprise under the Ministry of Justice will be a technical administrator and will be responsible for the data storage, protecting the system from unauthorized access.
Another “Goodies” for the Business
The law provides the introduction of the presumption of legitimacy of the entity. That is, if the provisions of laws or legislative acts allow the ambiguous interpretation of rights and duties of entities or the competences of the state supervision bodies, in this case the business will be right by default
In addition, the draft law prohibits establishing planned figures to bring the entities to the responsibility and applying sanctions to them. According to the people’s deputy Viktor Halasyuk, it will reduce the pressure on businesses and prevent the abuses of supervisory authorities.
According to the document, the entities with high risk level will be inspected biennially in the future. Today according to the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) expert, the most of businesses are related to the category of high risk.
The experts place emphasize on the fact that today there is the detection and confirmation of false information in the reporting documents and it is a basis for the unscheduled inspection. After the law will come into force, the entities will have a possibility to clarify the data. At the same time, the control authority will be obliged to report about noticed drawbacks. It the entity doesn’t have any time to improve the drawback, it will be inspected.