How to Lower Regulation Burden: Calculate the Execution Costs or Structure Them?

Almost one and a half years have passed since the completion of the ‘regulatory guillotine’. Such a comprehensive legislative reform took place for the first time in Russian history and was completed on a rather tight deadline. As part of this work, it was possible to revise mandatory requirements, systematize them, and get rid of the redundant ones. Now comes the time to revise the requirements based on an assessment of the compliance costs. The Moscow government assessed a number of mass mandatory requirements and prepared proposals for their abolition or mitigation in order to create a favourable business environment. The issue of assessing the costs of compliance with mandatory requirements becomes particularly relevant in the context of providing businesses with maximum freedom in order to overcome economic instability and solve import substitution problems. Reducing the regulatory burden can provide entrepreneurs with savings that can be used for investment purposes. Another way to reduce costs is to systematize mandatory requirements, creating registers and catalogues of requirements. On the one hand this will allow to create information systems based on those registers; on the other hand, it would allow in-depth analytics on the frequency of checking requirements and on their actual implementation. This task is complicated by the fact that mandatory requirements are enshrined in legislation in a hierarchical manner, i.e. each subsequent normative act specifies, discloses and describes this or that requirement in greater detail. To what extent are requirements and permitting regimes are a barrier to business creation/scaling? Which mandatory requirements remain the most problematic from the perspective of entrepreneurs? At what level should mandatory requirements be fixed? And what should the regulatory structure look like? What can or should be contained in departmental acts of regulatory bodies?