Compliance with Regulatory Impact Analysis Requirements- A Summary of the 2007 Evaluation
The RIAU recently commissioned NZIER to undertake the first evaluation of departmental compliance with the regulatory impact analysis (RIA) requirements that came into force on 1 April 2007. The evaluation has provided information on compliance, the processes followed by departments and the relationships between these processes and compliance.
In total NZIER evaluated 20 regulatory proposals that the authoring departments considered unlikely to have a significant impact on economic growth. Among the 20 regulatory proposals, 12 were evaluated based only on their regulatory impact statements (RISs), and 8 had their full RIA processes and their associated RISs evaluated.
A copy of the evaluation report can be viewed either by going to the MED website (www.med.govt.nz) or (if you have the electronic copy of this newsletter) by clicking on this link.
Here is a brief summary of the reports key findings and recommendations.
Key findings of the evaluation
Strong points of those RIAs and RISs that were evaluated were that consultation was usually well done with close attention being paid to submissions and making according amendments to proposals. In addition, the RISs were all sufficiently short and in relatively plain language.
However, there is still room for improvement. The areas needing improvement - as identified in the report - were defining the problem in the regulatory environment, describing the scale of the issue, and analysing the risks, costs and benefits of proposals. The report also noted that the final RIS did not always do justice to the quality of the underlying analysis.
Key Recommendations from the Evaluation
As a result of their evaluation, NZIER made a number of recommendations, including clarifying the purpose of the RIS and how it is different from a Cabinet paper, rationalising the guidance material and providing more support for analysts with no or little RIA experience.
Author: Jeff McDonald
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