MOSCOW, March 03, 2008 Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) presents information on how Russian entrepreneurs estimate the licensing system, as well as the system of business monitoring and control currently in force.

Problems connected with business administration today are quite topical. To be more exact, entrepreneurs tend to negatively estimate the activity of the licensing system, as well as the system of business monitoring and control: the mean score of these estimations totals 3.63 out of 7, i.e. it is below the median level. These estimations do not really depend on the size of the enterprise. Branch affiliation, however, has certain influence on the estimations. Owners and heads of companies working in the industry and construction tend to be disposed a little more optimistically (3.68 points; cf.: this index equals 3.55-3.57 points in other branches).

Businessmen make their main claims to the work of tax inspection bodies that interfere with the normal activity of 43% of companies participating in the survey. This includes 7% of respondents who indicate, that the activity that representatives of tax inspection demonstrated drastically interfered with their business activity. The State Fire-Fighting service, ecological inspection, Russian Agency for Health and Consumer Rights and licensing bodies all belong to the group of regulatory bodies that negatively influence Russian companies' activity. All of them made the business process of 24-37% of the companies more complicated, including 4-6% of enterprises and organizations that indicate that intervention of these bodies turned out to be a serious obstacle for their business activity.

The major claims that businessmen have against the way how the checks at their enterprises are carried out, can be summed up and expressed as follows: these checks are very often used as a means to make businessmen to enter corrupt relations with representatives of the regulatory bodies. In fact, the first three lines in the rating of problems that enterprises need to face during checks belong to complains on the fact that the supervisor requires an excessive number of documents that is not stipulated by the law (30%), on the fact that the checks occur with excessive frequency (23%) and on the actually direct or ambiguous hints as to the necessity of paying the "services" that the officials provide (18%). Entrepreneurs also indicate that these checks are frequently “ordered” (17%), which can also serve as a good proof of the fact that representatives of regulatory bodies are corrupt.

Too high expenses, first of all, of temporary type, that businessmen have to carry when going through the various monitoring and supervising procedures, make them search for ways to optimize the process. And bribes become the only tool, capable of shifting the business from "the dead point". The efficiency of use of corrupt mechanisms is especially evident when a question of the long-term procedures is touched upon, such as allocation of a ground area (bribery reduces the duration of the procedure on the average from 163 down to 58 days) or reception of the sanction to construction and reconstruction (from 134 down to 52 days). The economy of time when passing other procedures and using bribes is also impressive: the expenses are reduced in this case by 1.7-2.9 times.

The survey of 1200 Russian businessmen (owners and top-managers of private companies) was carried out in September - October 2007 in 40 constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The selection represents the enterprise community according to branch affiliation (based on three macro branches, i.e. the industry and construction; transport and communication; service and trade) and is proportional to their share in the national economy and the size of the enterprises (according to the number people employed).