On January 1st 2016 ‘supervisory holidays’ for small and medium-sized businesses will be introduced – businesses will be free from scheduled inspections of supervisory authorities for three years. But in the end the president promised ‘supervisory’ breaks will affect not every enterprise. Before the closing of the spring session of the State Duma a government bill was passed 'On a three-year ban on inspections of enterprises', but with a number of exceptions. Small businesses working in the health, education and social sphere, the heating and electricity sectors, as well as auditors and managers of apartment buildings, won’t be free from inspections.
Today planned inspections are actually aimed at lining inspectors’ pockets; while the number of inspections is excessive for small and medium-sized businesses, according to the State Duma faction of the LDPR, which stands for elimination of planned inspections. They say that dishonest officials have one big dilemma – to strangle business or simply to get money from it by making it a cash cow.
Andrew Svintsov, Member of the State Duma Committee on Property (LDPR faction), who was in the business from the mid-1990s, spoke about the history of relations between officials and representatives of small and medium business: “When it was suddenly possible, all the officials from the district to the mayor, entrepreneurs were perceived as people whom it is necessary to get profit on. That is not just possible, but necessary. They just rushed, rushed to impose any different kinds of taxes, which went directly into the pocket of all officials.
Somewhere in the mid-2000s, the procedure has already made improvements to these instructions. Inspectors' work is estimated by how many violations you registered, how much people you fined. It also deals with the Interior Ministry and Federal Service and so on. And so sometimes they really bring instructions to absurd, knowing that this or that instruction cannot be implemented. Their work is in some way valued by this criterion so if they do not have any violations on their territory, it turns out that they are not needed…
So all this work, unfortunately, is directed to preserve working places for the structures. In 1990s, in early 2000s, it was just robbery, so now people in these bodies are trying to invent such instructions. The instructions do not pass reading in the State Duma, those internal regulations are simply brought to the absurd, which themselves are subject to their own writing.”
The MP emphasizes that the way out of this situation “lies in what the President said”: “He has created a structure of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, it is, unfortunately, slow, not because it does not work, but because the problem is large. We need to move towards the provision of direct pressure on the government as a whole to control the monitoring bodies for small and medium business. We're not talking about the Central Bank. We are not talking about enterprises producing chemical products, where either nuclear reactors can be or and so on. We did not say we are talking about small shops, cafes, car washes, garages. This business, which feeding, in fact, the state and the budget, and the public and serves in all countries, we have now is just able, in fact, is already extinct in our country.”
