The Prevention Law
Timeline
The prevention law draft was put on analysis for the first time one year ago, on January 13th 2017.
Initiator: Ministry of the Business Environment, Commerce and Entrepreneurship
Passed in the Gov’t sitting on May 18th 2017.
Adopted by the Parliament only on November 29th 2017.
Published in the Official Gazette no. 1037 on December 28th 2017
Will be enforced – 20 days after publishing (January 17th 2018).
Scope of the law
When public authorities with control attributions, such as tax inspectors, labor inspectors, and others, discover irregularities in companies, they will first give warnings and draft a remedy plan.
Companies have a grace period of 90 days to comply with the public authority’s requirements. If they fail to do that, the inspectors will apply fines to them.
The bill cancels the initial fines in the case of several hundred offenses, replacing them with warnings. These include contraventions from the Labor Code, the law of electronic commerce (for example spams), apprenticeship law, the use of land, health norms, safety of dams, and the fiscal procedure code.
A number of 396 infringements were nominated into the political speech. The final version of the law doesn’t specify what kind of infringements are covered by the law.
Specific penalties and correction plan models will be set through a Government Decision act in term of 15 days after the publishing of the law (until January 12th 2018). Proposals of experts from 17 ministries have been gathered. They will cover the areas of: taxation, labour, agriculture, tourism, waters and forestation, environment protection, communications, education, consumer protection, local administration, internal affairs.
Main provisions of the law
The employer will be notified by the control inspectors at the first irregularity, without other complementary sanctions. The control inspectors will prepare a compliance plan for the employer, which consists in a number of measures to be taken during the next 90 days. The authority won’t apply the fine at the first discovery, but will close a report noting the breach of the law.
No warning sanction and no compliance plan to be applied, should the employer follow all ruling obligations during the control period.
During 10 calendar days after the deadline end, the control inspectors have to resume the inspection in order to check out if the employer has complied with the compliance measures. Should these measures have been fulfilled, they will be recorded in the final section of the compliance plan.
Should the control inspector notice that the compliance obligations haven’t been fulfilled, then the infringement sanctions stipulated by the law, other than warning, will be applied.
Should the employer be in other situation of infringement during three years after the first breaching of the law was reported, he will be sanctioned and amended according to the law provisions.
Next steps
The development of a portal for public information by the ministry, where authorities with inspection and penalty powers will be required to publish documentation and guides.
During three months after the law is enforced, these institutions must also create special sections on their website to inform the public about the authority’s attributions, as well as the rights and obligations of persons who are subject to inspection activities.
The public institutions and control bodies have the obligation to:
Prepare a guidance and control procedures to be followed by all people conducting the control activities
Displaying guidance solutions as well as guidance procedures on the own websites
At each control action, an active guidance role should be exercised by the control inspectors.