On September 13, 2005 the President of the Republic of Belarus signed an edict ¹ 432 “On certain measures for improving the organization of working with civilians in government agencies and other public organizations”. This document establishes common standard requirements concerning organization dealing with citizens in the public administration. The primary purpose of this act is to realize the “single window” principle and to eliminate the manifestations of government red tape. The edict specifies that the work of government agencies and organizations can only be defined by laws and presidential or governmental legislative enactments. As for local issues, the work could be defined by the decisions of regional and city councils of deputies and administrations. At that, local acts should have comprehensive character and should not contain referenced items. The acts are to comprise a thorough list of documents and data required from citizens applying for a certificate or other documents. This means that the applicants will have to submit only those documents that are mentioned in the act, while all the other necessary documents will be collected by the agency itself.
The edict ¹ 432 also defines the terms of the issuance of certificates. A regular term should not exceed 15 days and in the event of the need to refer for information to other institutions it should not exceed one month, provided that no special term is stipulated by the legislation or government regulations. With that, the term of certificate validity is imperatively set at 6 months, at the least.
Henceforward all government agencies and organizations are obliged to make available to the public the information concerning their structure, chief executive staff, working and reception hours etc. It is prohibited to suspend the reception because of temporal absence of the officer and to fail the terms of the issue of documents. The administrative sanctions for violating the norms of the regulation provide fines from 4 to 10 base values to the chief officer of the agency and the executive accountable.
