The number of unplanned inspections of businesses has significantly decreased since new rules went into effect limiting the regulatory burden on enterprises, Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina said Tuesday.
In the first quarter of 2010, there were only 405,000 inspections carried out on small businesses, excluding those by tax authorities and law enforcement, Nabiullina said at a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, according to comments posted on the government web site. That figure is down from 595,000 inspections in the third quarter of 2009 and 613,000 in the fourth quarter.
In May 2009, Kremlin-backed changes took effect requiring most state regulators to get permission for unscheduled inspections from local prosecutors. The new rules came in response to a call from President Dmitry Medvedev for the government to stop "causing nightmares" for small businesses.
Nabiullina said Tuesday that the measures had worked, as only 54 percent of the total number of inspections were carried out on small businesses.
"This figure seems high, but small businesses make up 68 percent of the total number of enterprises, meaning that the frequency of inspections on small businesses became smaller," she said.
But despite the decreased burden on small businesses, Nabiullina said only 3.8 percent of the inspections that are carried out go through the process of gaining consent from the Prosecutor General's Office.
"There are two reasons for this. First, the regulations requiring prosecutorial consent were taken out for certain agencies, including tax, customs, budget, transport and anti-monopoly authorities. … Second, other agencies simply aren't following the law, unfortunately," she said.
About 80 percent of the inspections are carried out by just five regulators: The Emergency Situations Ministry, the Federal Consumer Protection Agency, the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Atomic Inspection, the Federal Migration Service and the Federal Labor and Employment Service.
Putin asked Nabiullina to present proposals to reduce the number of agencies excepted from the rules and to create a system of monitoring to reduce the number of violations.
Also at the meeting, Nabiullina told Putin that new rules allowing entrepreneurs to start certain kinds of businesses without waiting for permission from the authorities has allowed 33,000 organizations to get their start without being burdened by regulators.
Under the new rules, which streamline the startup process in 20 sectors, 97 percent of those starting business in those respective fields say they have had no problems with regulators, Nabiullina said, citing a survey from small-business lobby group Opora.
"So, starting a business here, we can say, has been liberalized to a significant degree," Putin asked.
"But only in 20 spheres of activity," Nabiullina replied.