Resolution of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland of 21 July 2021 the Extraordinary Commission on Deregulation was appointed. It aims to minimise administrative and legal barriers.
The Commission shall have the following tasks:
- action in cases relating to the reduction of bureaucracy,
- processing of deregulation laws,
- review and analyse the provisions governing social, economic and economic issues in order to identify unclear, inconsistent, ineffective, redundant or excessively regulated provisions,
- a legislative initiative to achieve the objective referred to in point 3,
- dealing with draft laws on matters relating to the restriction of economic freedoms.
one from the results of the committee's activities to date, a recently passed Act of 26 January 2023 amending laws to remove unnecessary administrative and legal barriers.
The purpose of the above law was to amend several laws, including this most often in the media of the proposed amendment to the inheritance and donations tax bill[1], but also changes in, among others, the Code of Administrative Conduct, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Public Finance Act, or the law on proceedings before administrative courts.
The amendments are intended to help address the problems most frequently reported to the Commission, i.e. excessive regulation and formalisation of procedures and, as stated in the explanatory memorandum to the bill above, a specific "over-interpretation" of the law, consisting, inter alia, of extremely conservative, i.e.
safe, from the point of view of officials employed in offices serving public administrations but, in fact, flawed interpretation.
one the change is deleted Article 266 Public Finance Act. It concerned information provided by the management of local government units to the governing body. To date, the management of the local government unit was obliged to present to the body of the local government and the regional accounting chamber by the date of its submission. 31 August:
- information on the implementation of the budget of the local government unit for first six months,
- information on the development of the multiannual financial forecast, including the implementation of projects,
- information on the implementation of the entity’s financial plan for first six months, taking into account in particular the state of the receivables and liabilities, including the dues.
This obligation was to be sufficiently aggravating the staff of local government offices, and as indicated in the explanatory memorandum to the draft deregulation law, "the acquisition of this information does not serve any important purpose and does not fulfil any important role". In addition, it has been stressed that the repeal of the "objective obligation will reduce the costs of functioning of local government units and will increase their autonomy to a small extent by not having to submit the above information to regional accounting chambers".
This is one of several changes introduced by the deregulation law. Is it really going to be another good step in eliminating administrative and legal barriers, according to its full title? Time will tell.
[1] We are talking about changing the amount of tax-free amounts in a given law. According to the amendments adopted, they represent respectively twelve times, nine times and six times the minimum wage for work.