The Ministry of Economic Development and the SME Corporation have prepared a package of relevant amendments to the Code.

The government has formed a regulatory package to support small business - a set of fundamental changes to reduce the burden on SMEs in the Code of Administrative Offences (CAO). The list includes initiatives to significantly reduce fines, according to a draft law prepared by the Ministry of Economic Development and the SME Corporation.

These amendments are most in demand among entrepreneurs, so it is important that they work as quickly as possible:

The rejection of monetary penalties for first-time violations. Instead of a fine, it is proposed to issue a warning "as the only permissible administrative punishment" for a single non-compliance with the code.

• Reducing the amount of fines for social non-profit organizations, micro- and small businesses to the level of penalties applicable to individual entrepreneurs. The explanatory note argues for such a measure as follows. Currently about 96% of all SMEs are micro-enterprises, another 3.7% are small and only 0.3% are medium-sized. Among the first two categories the share of legal entities is less than half - 39%, the rest is a business in the form of individual entrepreneurs, the document says. At the same time the difference in the amount of penalties for individual entrepreneurs and organizations reaches 500-900%, at least according to their maximum level. Moreover, the amount of the penalty does not depend on the scale of the business - even if the turnover of an individual entrepreneur is significantly higher than that of a legal entity with similar activities, the former will pay much less, follows from the document. Often this leads to a penalty disproportionate to the size of the business. This approach is irrelevant, so we should equate the amount of the fine for micro and small businesses, as well as non-profit organizations, with the penalty for individual entrepreneurs.
• The abolition of summing up fines for the same violations, revealed during the inspection. That is, if a company has failed to comply with a number of prescriptions of the CAO, included in one article of the Code, the penalty is imposed for non-compliance with only one point, not all. According to the principle: one inspection - one fine under an article of the CAO.
• To duplication of penalties for a company and its official for the same violations. If there is a guilty individual, a legal entity need not be fined, follows from the bill.

Elena Gladysheva answered questions about changes in fines for small businesses in a live broadcast on RBC - Will it change the situation? How relevant, effective, timely is such a regulatory package? What methods might be more appropriate? How do you assess the legislative initiative?