Agenda: protecting the rights of businesses in the course of federal and municipal oversight, improving the regulatory framework for tourism.
Government meeting
From Dmitry
Medvedev’s opening remarks:
President Vladimir Putin has delivered his annual Address to the Federal Assembly today. He has enumerated the challenging tasks facing the country and all branches of authority, including the Government, in this difficult period.
I suggest that, instead of waiting for instructions, we start working immediately. The deputy prime ministers, ministers and heads of agencies must direct their efforts at achieving the goals expressed in the Presidential Address within their spheres of competence. There must be no delays. We need to prepare all the necessary decisions in the shortest time possible.
Today we will discuss
several draft laws. The first of them would facilitate interaction between
government agencies and businesses during federal and municipal inspections. This is fully in keeping with what the President
said in his address. We must make this mechanism transparent, convenient and,
most importantly, cheap and less time consuming. Improving the regulatory
environment is a vital part of the efforts to improve business conditions.
What specifically do we propose? First, we propose lifting from businesses some of the burden of collecting and submitting documents to oversight agencies, which can request this information directly from other government agencies. Second, during inspections, oversight agencies must not request documents that have been provided to it before, which should rule out unnecessary paperwork. Likewise, during planned inspections agencies must not request the documents which other federal and municipal oversight agencies have at their disposal. And third, they must not request information that is available from state information systems and registers.
Another delicate issue we will discuss today is foreign travel. Recently many tourists have been left stranded abroad, without hotel accommodations or return tickets, because of the collapse of some of our major travel agencies. They returned home only thanks to financial assistance from the Turpomoshch (Tour Help) service of Russian travel agencies and help from the Foreign Ministry and other government agencies.
A bill has been drafted to prevent a repetition of this, which we will discuss today. It provides for creating a reserve fund for travel agencies and a personal liability fund. These funds would finance emergency assistance to our tourists abroad. The proposed entry fee for foreign travel agencies is 100,000 roubles, with a fixed annual fee ranging between 100,000 and 500,000 roubles. The size of these funds will depend on the number of tourists going abroad.
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