The Report of the Assonime Board identifies some lines of action to make Italy a more attractive place for business activity, focusing on three issues:
1. Constitutional reform
With the transition to a differentiated bicameral system, the Senate will have the task of verifying the implementation of laws and the impact of public policies, and evaluating the work of public administrations. The entire implementation dimension of public policies, which constitutes a weak point of our system, thus acquires greater importance. It will be necessary to deepen the control tools through which the Senate will be able to carry out the new task.
In recent years there has been excessive and anomalous use of the emergency decree. The envisaged introduction into the Constitution of the institute of voting on a certain date, which allows for a rapid approval process for priority bills, and new and more stringent limits to the emergency decree and the content of the conversion laws may be useful for overcome this criticality, which often results in a poor quality of legislation.
The abolition of the Provinces, aimed at simplifying the institutional framework, should be accompanied by uniform criteria for the division between Regions and local administrations of the functions originally performed by the suppressed entities. Otherwise there is the risk that a heterogeneous and very complicated set of competences will emerge on the national territory.
The envisaged amendments to Article 117 of the Constitution represent a fundamental step towards a better quality of legislation. In fact, matters and functions for which a fragmentation of the rules on the national territory is unjustified and inefficient are appropriately brought back to the legislative competence of the State and, to complete the system, a supremacy clause is introduced to be used when the protection of unity requires it. of the Republic or the national interest. The attribution to the competence of the State of the rules on the administrative procedure in order to "ensure uniformity on the national territory" can contribute significantly to the removal of discrepancies and unjustified fulfilments.
Finally, through the new formulation of article 118 of the Constitution, the central and local public administrations are reminded in a more incisive way to respect the principles of simplification, efficiency and responsibility.
2. Efficiency and predictability of administrative procedures
Since the XNUMXs, there have been numerous changes to the legislation on administrative procedure. A balance must be found between the need for certainty and stability of the rules and that of correcting what still hinders the efficiency and predictability of administrative procedures.
To ensure the effectiveness of the SCIA system, it is necessary that the legislation clearly establishes the requirements and conditions that must be met for the start-up and exercise of the business activity.
The hypotheses in which it is possible for the administrations to intervene in self-protection should be more precisely delimited at the regulatory level, balancing ex lege with the interest in the certainty of the legal situations. In addition to the provisions of the Sblocca Italia law decree, the possibility of revoking the provision based on a new assessment of the public interest should in any case be excluded. For the ex officio annulment of the illegitimate provision, setting a maximum term of two years would be positive; for SCIA, however, given the nature of the institute, the term should be considerably shorter.
The services conference was not effective as a tool for quickly achieving shared solutions. The bill on the reorganization of public administrations provides for a mandate to reorganize the discipline, based on shared principles. In order to overcome the critical issues, however, it is necessary to limit as much as possible the cases in which acts of assent are required by several administrations and to strengthen the obligation for the proceeding administration to adopt the final decision within the foreseen times, through more incisive accountability mechanisms of the current ones. A fundamental need is to improve the current mechanisms for settling interests in the event of dissent by administrations responsible for protecting sensitive interests.
The establishment of investigative committees that actively promote the achievement of an agreed solution within a given time frame is a course to follow. In the event of failure to settle the interests, the dissenting administration could be assigned the task of submitting the question to the political decision-maker of last resort, providing that if this option is not exercised, the dissent is to be considered obsolete. A more constructive attitude of the administrations with respect to the composition of interests and greater selectivity in the adoption of blocking positions would thus be encouraged.
The standardization and simplification of the building, SUAP and environmental forms envisaged by the three-year Agenda for simplification must be accompanied by the commitment to make relations with the administrations easier for citizens and businesses, also by preparing guides and instructions easily understandable operations. However, an indispensable prerequisite for making a change in the system is the adoption by individual administrations of a collaborative attitude towards the citizen/user, which helps him to advance in the bureaucratic process, alleviating his burdens and fulfilments.
In implementing the Digital Agenda, it is important to fill the gaps and at the same time enhance the positive things that have already been achieved in Italy. The IT management of the Business Register is an example of efficiency and therefore it does not appear appropriate to change its governance. Rather, it is necessary to act in an incisive way to implement the principle of ex officio verification, with decisive action to make the information systems of the administrations interoperable and to allow access by the latter free of charge to the databases. To make the one-stop shops effective tools for simplifying relations with public administrations, it is not enough to automate existing processes: the processes must be reviewed, from the back office to the front end, to adapt them to digitalisation. It is therefore necessary to intervene on the organizational profiles and promote coordination between the administrations involved.
3. Removal of unjustified restrictions
The simplification policy must not be limited to interventions on the general regulation of administrative procedures: it is also necessary to remove those regulatory or administrative restrictions which, in the context of the individual sectors, unjustifiably restrict the exercise of free economic initiative.
In our legal system we already have principles and tools, inspired by European law, aimed at eliminating these restrictions through case-by-case interventions. To proceed in a systematic way, however, an organic work of reviewing the discipline of the individual sectors is needed. A reorganization, through consolidated texts, of the current rules that takes into account the principles of liberalization and simplification would contribute significantly to the quality of the regulatory framework.
To prevent the introduction of new unjustified restrictions, especially at the local and regional level, it is necessary to strengthen the impact analysis which is generally lacking in our system, to promote a training action for administrations on the need to respect the principles of liberalization and disseminate pro-competitive best practices at regional and local level.
Attachments: Assonime report on business activities.pdf
