MOSCOW, 2 Nov. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will on Monday hold a meeting on improving oversight activities.
Last week there was a theme of the merger of the two oversight agencies — the Federal service for veterinary and phytosanitary surveillance and Federal service for supervision of consumer rights protection. The assistant head of the Rosselkhoznadzor Alexei Alekseyenko told reporters that the “decision in principle on the merger of services”. He noted that details still being worked out, and the process may take at least a year.
At the same time, the Minister for open government Mikhail Abyzov has denied allegations that the decision to combine the Rosselkhoznadzor and Rospotrebnadzor. Later, the Rosselkhoznadzor after Abyzov also denied the information about the merger of services, stating that “the decision to establish such a service, its structure and functions by the government of the Russian Federation was not accepted”.
Not first, not last
The question of abolishing some Federal agencies, and creation on their basis of other in Russia, as in other States, raised and solved regularly in recent years. Ministries and departments are being eliminated, are being introduced in other, separate and completely new, such as the Ministry for Far East development, or the Ministry of the North Caucasus.
Once the process of reorganization and optimization of the work of Federal agencies with overlapping functions in Russia began with the proposal of the Prime Minister to consolidate the Federal Antimonopoly service and Federal tariff service, the head of the merged structure became the head of FAS Igor Artemyev. Activities on the elimination of the tariff service must be completed prior to March 1, 2016.
In early September it became known about creation of the uniform automated system, which will be the aggregator of the data from the internal revenue service and the Federal tariff service, after which many experts and Federal officials began talking about a possible full merger of these departments in the future.
In October, started to circulate rumors about the necessity of unification of the Rosselkhoznadzor and Rospotrebnadzor.
The benefits in terms
The unification of the functions of Rosselkhoznadzor and Rospotrebnadzor will be beneficial for retailers, if the Supervisory practice will then become clear and transparent, according to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Association of retail companies (akort) Ilya Lomakin-Rumyantsev. He noted that the difference of views and opinions from Federal agencies on the same issue often harms the consumer market.
Win for retail, in his opinion, would be “to harmonize, in building a non — rival rules of conduct when one and the same action may not simultaneously be considered a violation or not a violation.” In addition, it will allow you to monitor the entire production chain, said the expert.
Question to avoid duplication of some functions of Rosselkhoznadzor and Rospotrebnadzor have for a long time and discussed by the agencies. According to a representative of the HSE, “if the merger does not happen, I hope that the approaches and principles have become more consistent”. Lomakin-Rumyantsev stressed that you first need to think seriously about the consumers, whose preferences today are shifting towards cheaper products.
“Unfortunately, this encourages unscrupulous manufacturers to take another look at quality assurance, this is a very serious problem requiring decisions of the consolidated agencies,” he said.
Business opinion
The Chairman of the Committee on agriculture of the “Business Russia” Andrey Danilenko said that their organization had not received any draft documents about the unification of the Rosselkhoznadzor and Rospotrebnadzor and did not participate in any discussion on a similar theme. At the same time, he noted that “in any case, the business has always supported the elimination of administrative barriers and overlapping functions and increasing efficiency of regulatory and Supervisory agencies”.
In turn, the business Ombudsman Boris Titov also believes that “any path to reduce regulatory authorities, is it correct… supervision, in principle, could be combined”.
He believes that “the less of the auditee, the better.” “In our view, the best option is three, which carry out technical control, financial control (here tax and customs), and those who carry out special supervision, Rosatom for example, there are specific things that are associated with many nuances and threats to people,” said Titov.
Business Ombudsman believes that in the last time “the CPS has made considerable steps forward, from the point of view of reducing administrative pressure”.
“We went out on the risk based approach, practical. The number of inspections has decreased dramatically, while the quality of the product on the shelves not getting worse, that’s for sure, and even improving, the effectiveness of supervision has increased significantly. The Rosselkhoznadzor, — there is an extra administrative burden on business, therefore, we must take the best practice in integration, but not the worst,” added Titov.
