Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 25th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview III. PA Reform Author(s) Elena Dobrolyubova The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration Moscow Russian Federation Title Evaluating Performance of Government Inspection Bodies: Evolving Approaches File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Elena Dobrolyubova Abstract Ensuring the public safety and limiting administrative barriers have been the two core objectives of the most reforms in the area of business inspections and regulatory enforcement for the past decade or so. However, measuring these efforts has proved quite challenging both in OECD countries, and in Russia. Unlike in the areas of financial management, public services, or procurement, there is little cross-country comparative data on business inspections which could suggest whether a country is doing well on one or another area subject to state control (with some exceptions, such as tax and customs control, which still seem to confirm the general rule). There is also no common framework for measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of business inspections activity, while some approaches to good practices have been proposed only recently by the OECD. This debate is highly relevant to the Russian public administration reform agenda where improving the performance of regulatory enforcement bodies has been taken as a strategic priority. Achieving the objective of this reform would call for re-inventing the performance framework of the government inspections bodies, which is currently fragmented and inconsistent and has a significant bias on sanctions rather than on ultimate outcomes of safe public environment ensured at a reasonable cost. The objective of this paper is to develop a framework for defining and evaluating both the effectiveness and the efficiency in the area of regulatory enforcement and to apply this framework to several areas of inspection activities (such as occupational and food safety) in Russia. The paper first reviews the existing approaches to measuring performance of government inspection bodies both in selected OECD countries (based on both literature review and practical examples). It then focuses on formulating the general framework for evaluating performance of regulatory enforcement bodies. Based on this framework, an evaluation of effectiveness and efficiency of government inspection bodies in selected sectors is conducted with benchmarking to international examples, as far as comparative data permits. The paper is based on both qualitative analytical methods (such as literature review and case study) and quantitative methods (such as sociological surveys and statistical research). The results of the analysis suggest that evaluating performance of business inspections should include all steps for minimizing risks and losses in the controlled area – from prevention of violations (reducing risks) to ensuring the reimbursement, should the risk event happen. While a number of factors influence the outcomes of the inspection process (with government bodies being only one factor), a multi-layer performance framework including outcomes, intermediate results, and outputs should be used. Implementing such framework requires efforts on collecting the data independent from the authority which is subject to evaluation, however, the public sector innovations and the ICT use could help in meeting such data requirements. The performance framework should factor in the actual administrative costs associated with regulatory inspections, both on the business and on the budget side.
