Source: delo.ua.
From the beginning of 2018, the moratorium on business inspections will be terminated in Ukraine. There will be more inspections, but the parliament and the government still tried to soften this blow to entrepreneurs. Delo.UA figured out what changes to the rules of inspections entrepreneurs should be prepared for.
In a month and a half – from the beginning of 2018 – the moratorium on business inspections, which was first introduced by Arseniy Yatsenyuk in August 2014, and then extended by Vladymyr Groysman in the end of 2016, will be terminated in Ukraine. The deregulation adherents declared at that moment that the current excessive pressure on the business by the state supervisory bodies was disproportionate to the actual results of inspections. They said, state supervision didn’t lead to reducing the number of fires or increasing the safety of products.
“For example, statistics of food safety and hazard does not change. We are talking about 70% of counterfeit products every year. Regardless of whether there are inspections or not. Statistics are always bad,” the head of the State Regulatory Service (SRS) Kseniya Lyapina explained the need for the moratorium year ago. According to the SRS head, inspectors with inspections visit just legal entrepreneurs, and unscrupulous business owners, they say, simply get off with this.
Lyapina assured that they would be able to build a more efficient and transparent system of state control for the year of the moratorium period.
Public inspection plans
At the end of last year, the Verkhovna Rada adopted another law along with the moratorium on inspections – the law on liberalization of state supervision. The authors of the document insisted that it would add clarity and transparency to the procedures to control entrepreneurs.
The existence of general and special laws as well as many subordinate acts are often the problem of Ukrainian legislation. The “rule of the game” for business are set by dozens of documents – several laws, resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers, decrees of certain ministries, orders and instructions of particular executive bodies. The deputies tried to simplify the system of inspections for entrepreneurs a little bit with the help of the law on the liberalization of state supervision.
Firstly, the law extended the general rules of state supervision and restrictions on the duration of control measures to the inspections of the State Fiscal Service (SFS), the State Architectural and Construction Inspectorate (SACI), the State Service for Labor and some other bodies. Secondly, the document obliged the State Regulatory Service to develop an integrated automated system of inspections, where starting from 2018, inspectors should enter not only plans of inspections, but also summary reports and reports on violations found, in 2017.
A few weeks ago, the State Regulatory Service together with the Ministry of Economic Development and the non-governmental Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) launched a portal where all state supervision measures will be published.
Any enterprise can already check online whether it is included in the plan of comprehensive inspections for 2018 via just by entering its EDRPOU code.
The BRDO Head Oleksiy Honcharuk says that at this point, it is just a pilot mode of a unified system of inspections. According to him, a large database, a large integrated system should be created in parallel. “But the pilot mode does not mean that the functionality of the system launched is limited. Everything that the law provided for will be implemented,” Honcharuk assures. “All government bodies are already connected to the module, they have personal profiles and upload all their inspection plans for the next year to the single database. All inspection plans – both comprehensive and annual plans of the bodies should be in this module in 2018.”
Nevertheless, for now, there may be no inspection plans of those bodies, for which law has established exceptions and does not directly oblige to submit their plans of inspections to enter into the system, for example, the SFS.
The BRDO Head also says that the government is planning by its order to oblige government agencies to publish, in addition to the plans, other information, in particular data on unscheduled inspections conducted, forms of inspection acts with a clear list of questions to ask entrepreneurs during supervisory measures as well as information on the risk criteria, based on which government agencies makes their inspection plans.
“We are now working on the implementation of the law (on liberalization of state supervision – Ed.) adopted last year. We are trying to change the system of state supervision. After all, now the number of inspections does not correlate, for example, with the number of fires. Nevertheless, about 80 of our state bodies are subjects of this reform process. Saying correctly, they have a different attitude to these innovations. Basically, it is negative,” the First Deputy Minister of Economic Development Maksym Nefyodov says.
The plans for 2018 are as follows: to develop risk criteria for a “healthy person” (as the MEDT says, the current ones are outdated and primitive), this will allow to divide enterprises into groups and inspect the risk companies. Secondly, it is necessary to develop a methodology regarding what exactly the state agencies should control. After all, now the business does not understand what requirements it should fulfill, while control bodies inspect the company’s compliance with all the laws.
There will be more inspections after the moratorium
The deputies did not register initiatives to extend the moratorium. This measure, they said, was temporary. Therefore, it is likely to be terminated from the beginning of 2018.
To tell the truth, the current moratorium is not an absolute ban on business inspections, it rather acts as a restriction.
Planned inspections are now forbidden for most agencies, including the State Service for Labor, the State Environmental Inspection, the State Service for Emergency Situations, the State Architectural and Construction Inspection. But there is an exception provided for a small number of supervisory bodies. For example, the State Fiscal Service, the State Service for Food Safety,
the State Service for Export Control, and the State Aviation Service can conduct inspections in the current year.
In addition, unscheduled inspections are still carried out all year round. The only thing, the procedure to conduct them was made more severe since the beginning of 2017: a list of grounds for such a control measure was reduced, and the government bodies were obliged to obtain permission from the State Regulatory Service. According to the information of the SRS, it gave permission to conduct 150-250 unscheduled inspections of enterprises per month throughout Ukraine.
After the termination of the moratorium in 2018, planned inspections will be a full part of the life of entrepreneurs. But the parliament and the government tried to soften this blow for business a little bit.
The law on liberalization of state supervision introduced a new rule: if a company is included into inspection plans of several government bodies at once, they are obliged to carry out control measures comprehensively and at the same time.
The Ministry of Economy is optimistic: they expect that this step will reduce the number of contacts between the supervisory bodies and the business by 15-30%.