Why are entrepreneurs increasingly facing obstacles when registering their businesses, and what steps is the government taking to simplify the bureaucratic burden on small and medium-sized businesses? Is it possible to create transparent rules of the game for aspiring business owners, and what is the real prospect of reducing administrative barriers in the coming years?
The state is a huge machine with a long memory. She spent decades learning how to defend herself against one-day firms, cashing out, and gray schemes. And now this flywheel is crushing everyone by inertia.
Why has registration turned into an obstacle course?
To the inspector on the other end of the line, any new entrepreneur looks like a potential violator by default. The system does not work on trust, but on preventive risk blocking. This is where the legs of the most common problems grow from.:
- Fight against "technical" companies. The tax service's algorithms see suspicious activity where there is none. For example, you register an LLC from your apartment (which is absolutely legal), but for the system, the mass registration address is a red flag.
- Bank compliance. Banks are now more afraid of the regulator than they are of losing a customer. They can delay opening an account for months or block transfers, requiring a ton of paperwork simply because your OKVED matched the profile of a dubious office.
- Reinsurance syndrome. It is easier for an official to find fault with a comma in the charter and wrap up the documents than to take responsibility for registering a company that may be under suspicion in a month.
What is the government doing to break the ice?
We must pay tribute, digitalization has really eaten up a huge part of the paperwork. What used to take weeks of running through the corridors is now being done on a smartphone.:
- "State key" and deleted signature. Now you don't have to look for a certification center and pay for a signed USB stick. Everything is released online right in the app.
- Experiment with remote cancellation of bounces. If the tax service has blocked your business registration application due to a technical error, in many regions you can already click the "Fix" button in your personal account, attach the correct document, and the matter will go on without a new fee and going to the inspection.
- Self-employed regime (NAP). It was an ingenious hole in the wall of bureaucracy. Millions of people came out of the shadows simply because they were offered to legalize in two clicks without reports, cash registers and declarations. The state has understood the main principle: if the rules are simpler than breaking them, people will comply with the law.
- Automated Simplification (ASN). An experimental regime where taxes are calculated on their own based on data from banks, and declarations are not needed at all. For microbusiness, this is almost communism.
- The registry model. Refusal of licenses on paper. The examiner just needs to go to the digital registry and see that you have permission. It is illegal to require a paper certificate.
Is it possible to create transparent rules of the game?
Yes, technically we're getting close to it. Transparency is born when the human factor disappears. When the decision is made not by the inspector after lunch, but by a neural network using a clear algorithm. Imagine an entrepreneur's personal account, where instead of a list of 50 necessary certificates, there is one "Start a business" button. The system itself pulls up your data from Public Services, checks the address, the absence of criminal records and debts, reserves the name and issues an electronic signature. You press one button, and an hour later you receive an extract from the registry.
But the main problem of transparency lies not in IT, but in law enforcement. We need a hard link: unjustified refusal of an official = automatic complaint to the prosecutor's office + fine to the agency. As long as the agency does not risk anything by coming up with new requirements for the letters in the statement, there will be no transparency.
What is the real prospect of reducing barriers?
She's ambivalent. In the next couple of years, the life of a small business will become noticeably easier in terms of processes. We are moving towards the fact that communication with the government will be reduced to zero: everything will happen in the background through banking applications and personal offices of departments. Opening an individual entrepreneur will soon be no more difficult than creating an account on a social network.
But in terms of the essence of the rules, the game will remain tough. Administrative barriers are changing shape. The tax queue is being replaced by strict compliance from banks and marketplaces. Blocking the bank's personal account is becoming a new type of administrative pressure, against which the entrepreneur still has much less protection than against the refusal of the Federal Tax Service.
In addition, there remains a gap between the federal center and the regions. In Moscow, opening a coffee shop is a matter of a couple of days, but in a small region, trying to get a sign or a room redeveloped can still turn into a six-month quest.
So for novice businessmen, the rules will become fairer visually, but you will still have to play carefully. The main skill of a future entrepreneur is not the ability to negotiate in the offices, but the ability to flawlessly keep white accounting and prove the legality of each of his ruble to algorithms. Bureaucracy will not go anywhere, it will simply move from a folder with a stamp paper to the lines of program code. The main thing is that this code works for creation, not for paranoia.