To meet the reduction aim public authorities must assess the impact of new regulation on businesses. If there are significant impacts on businesses (>10 mill. DKK in compliance costs or >4 mill. DKK in administrative consequences) the consequences must be quantified and published as part of the public consultation of the new regulatory proposal.
Team Smart Regulation advises public authorities on how to carry out impact assessments and monitors the overall development of business’ compliance costs. The team also advises public authorities on regulatory burden reduction and on how businesses may be involved and their knowledge taken into consideration in simplification projects.
Furthermore Team Smart Regulation is responsible for assessing and measuring administrative burdens on businesses.
Reduction of administrative burdens
New proposals for business regulation are being assessed with a view to identifying unnecessary administrative burdens imposed on businesses. The administration of the rules must be as simple as possible for businesses.
In order to be able to prevent new burdens, the AMVAB method – a quantitative method similar to the SCM method used at EU level – is used to carry out measurements of all proposals for new regulation implying a considerable increase or decrease of burdens.
Proposals with an increase or decrease of burdens of more than 10.000 hours annually, corresponding to an annual amount of 4 million DKK, are subject to a measurement and must be presented to the Economic Committee of the Danish government.
The measurements help to assess the potential effects of new regulation on businesses. In addition, the results feed into recommendations proposing ways to make the rules less burdensome for businesses without jeopardizing the intended goals of legal acts.
In addition to contributing to the efforts to reduce administrative burdens in new legislation, the AMVAB measurements make it possible to monitor the administrative burden development.
EU efforts
A considerable part of the rules imposed on Danish businesses stem from the EU. Efforts aim at maintaining a continuous strong focus on the EU smart regulation agenda and at ensuring that EU initiatives also focus on the areas considered the most important by businesses.
To ensure that Danish businesses can benefit from good framework conditions, EU initiatives must be introduced without gold-plating. In addition, initiatives which are adopted to reduce burdens for European businesses must be implemented in Denmark.
Similarly to its national efforts, Team Smart Regulation assists the authorities to help these target administrative burdens reduction in EU regulation. The team can help authorities with calculations, argumentation and proposals based on concrete experiences and knowledge from businesses which the authorities, in turn, can use in negotiations.