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- The amount of work in the enforcement of administrative fines in state institutions has generally increased, but the results have not improved. After the changes in the regulation of enforcement of administrative fines, the work of the State Police was most affected because its amount increased five times.
- Due to the changed procedure for the enforcement of administrative fines for violations in road traffic, the already limited human resources of the State Police must be directed to administrative activities increasingly to ensure the enforcement of administrative fines, instead of involving police officers in areas more important to public safety and public order.
- The enforcement function of fines should be centralized to reduce red tape and save resources. Now, this function is performed by 1,570 employees, for 98% of whom it is one of many other duties, in 27 state institutions. By centralizing the performance of the function, it would require 73 full-time employees, which, according to the State Audit Office of Latvia, could be further reduced by half.
- E-services and automated administration of the enforcement of fines would eliminate the risk of errors in payments and save the resources of state institutions.
- The audit results confirm the importance of ex-ante impact assessment and ex-post evaluation when implementing and evaluating major changes.
Red tape and amount of work of the state institutions in the enforcement of administrative fines has generally increased, but the indicators of the payment of administrative fines have not improved significantly, as it was concluded after the audit by the State Audit Office of Latvia assessing whether the established system of enforcement of administrative fines functioned effectively and whether the enforcement of fines was ensured with as few resources as possible.
The Law on Administrative Liability entered into force on 1 July 2020 by establishing several changes in the enforcement process of administrative fines. The audit findings highlight the importance of ex-ante initial impact assessment and ex-post evaluation when implementing new regulations and reforms. “Although the ex-ante initial impact assessment of the Law predicted that the new regulation would not affect the day-to-day functions of state institutions and courts financially and, therefore, they did not plan additional resources, the opposite happened in reality because state institutions required more resources than before and one could have forecasted that during the reform planning stage. Without evaluating the impact of the planned changes on the functions of state institutions and necessary resources, one did not assess whether the changes were proportionate compared to the planned benefits. Similarly, a timely ex-post evaluation of the new regulation would allow one to evaluate the effectiveness of the changes, identify deficiencies and improve the new regulation, having noticed that we were doing more, but the results were not improving significantly,” explained Ms Kristīne Jaunzeme, Council Member of the State Audit Office of Latvia.
