Recently, the media reported that the new draft version of the Law “On Basic Principles of State Supervision (Control)” contains a provision providing that scheduled inspections without notification are no longer considered as a violation.
In fact, the only inspections that can be conducted without notification under the current law and the new draft law are the unscheduled ones.
In turn, under current legislation, today entrepreneurs can learn about scheduled inspections in various ways, in particular:
- on the regulatory authority’s website (an inspection plan for the next year is published by December 1);
- On the Inspection Portal website (inspection plans are published there at the same time as on the websites of regulatory authorities);
- through web services, chatbots, and mobile applications that use the open data of the Inspection Portal (the publication date is the same);
- as well as through a written notice sent by the regulatory authority by mail 10 days before the inspection.
In the past, when there were no other options or they were not commonly used, written notices were the main mechanism by which inspection bodies sent information on scheduled inspections and entrepreneurs received it. However, in addition to protecting entrepreneurs, postal notices cost millions a year, can be lost, or entrepreneurs sometimes refuse to receive them, and it may result in conflicts.
The Inspection Portal, on which inspection bodies are required to publish information on inspections, including inspection plans, has been operating for several years. This portal has a multi-million audience, so it is planned to implement the functionality of automatic notification of scheduled inspections here.
Additionally, BRDO analyzed that in 2021, the audience of open data-based services would be 5-7 million users per month, in particular, in competitive intelligence — from 1.2 to 2.7. For example, more than 180,000 Opendatabot users subscribed to receive company information updates and have all information about all company inspections, including scheduled inspections. Therefore, the Inspection Portal and open data-based services that often provide scheduled inspection notification functionality free of charge will perform the notification function better than postal notices in 2023.
Scheduled inspections that are not published in the relevant annual plan on the website (and, accordingly, on the Inspection Portal) are considered illegal (ie entrepreneurs have the right to use this reason for refusing the inspection). By the way, in 2021, it is planned to inspect about 90 thousand business entities.
The current Law also stipulates that inspections about which entrepreneurs did not receive any written notices 10 days before the inspection date are illegal. The new draft law cancels this outdated provision, as this way of informing had been introduced before the Inspection Portal was launched. Moreover, written notices create the risk of abuse by unscrupulous entrepreneurs who may knowingly not receive them.
In such a way, both the provision that allows entrepreneurs to refuse scheduled inspections due to the absence of such a notice and the fine for regulatory bodies for failure to send a notice were canceled.
At the same time, all other ways of informing remain unchanged. Moreover, the Inspection Portal will send notifications by e-mail (to those entrepreneurs who have such email addresses in the USR).
Learn more about the inspection reform at: https://en.brdo.com.ua/main/state-supervision-and-control-reform-the-government-approved-the-draft-law/