Vladimir Putin admits that there has hardly been any improvement.
The issue of excessive administrative procedures was raised anew at Thursday's government meeting. In spite of the actions taken by the country's leadership, agencies continue to make conducting business a "nightmare" in Russia. Vladimir Putin discussed the disappointing results of an inspection of monitoring and oversight agencies carried out by the Prosecutor General's Office.
Even major projects of national importance run into administrative barriers. Putin mentioned the visit he made to Vladivostok earlier in the week to see how preparations for the APEC Summit were going.
"After making time for all the inspections, there is hardly any time left to do actual work. All you have time for is paperwork," the prime minister said. Similar complaints were voiced by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak. In the run up to the Sochi investment forum on September 17 he stated that even the government-backed Olympic construction programme was running into bureaucratic obstacles. There is still an enormous amount of unnecessary procedures. Among the laws in need of amendment, the deputy prime minister mentioned the Land Code, the law On Property Registration and the Urban Development Code.
On Thursday Vladimir Putin recognized that the number of inspections has not gone down. "After we imposed limits on inspections of small and medium-sized businesses, all the oversight organizations pounced on the remaining sites," Putin fumed.
The prime minister said that the "expert opinions and all sorts of other documents thought up by bureaucrats" are still around. Government agencies often delegate payment services to commercial entities with links to government officials. "It's common practice to receive payments from entities whose work the officials are supposed to oversee," Putin said.
"From 2006 to 2008, when administrative reform was just getting started, there was a tendency towards over-regulating government services, although the original framework envisaged monitoring and oversight actions," Vladimir Yuzhakov, director of the administrative reform department at the Strategic Developments Centre, told Gazeta. In Yuzhakov's opinion, Vladimir Putin's assessment on Thursday could have been even harsher.
"While something is being done with regard to government services, it is not enough and currently, the changes made in the field of monitoring and oversight are still on paper," Yuzhakov explained. He believes that monitoring and oversight is subject to the least amount of legislative regulation. There are no laws codifying the goals of monitoring and government agencies set the requirements for their audits themselves.
Vladimir Putin called on cabinet ministers to accelerate the process of administrative reform. Regulations regarding all government functions are to be adopted in the near future. The prime minister said that these regulations should clearly state the scale, stages, and timeframe of administrative procedures and establish uniform pricing standards for government services. Putin believes that the government needs to make a transition from a culture of permission to one of notification.
Andrei Biryukov