Jacobs, Cordova & Associates (JC&A) was asked by the Asian Development Bank to undertake a legal review of the legal framework of the inspection and control bodies in Tajikistan. JC&A performed a rapid legal mapping and analysis of 29 inspection bodies with control functions affecting the business environment of the country. Based on evidence gather through deskwork and interviews concerning compliance costs, duplication and overlaps as well as using international best practice as benchmarks, JC&A recommended a new institutional and legal infrastructure and provided policy options for the implementation of the reforms. The reforms should permit Tajikistan to consolidate these 29 existing bodies into a new and more efficient institutional architecture of 10 inspectorates.
Based in part of the report’s results, the government has updated the Inspection Law and developed an action plan. Since January 2017. the Government has started implementing the recommendations with proposals to merge of five existing inspectorates around two new inspection bodies one for food safety and the other for health. The Action plan also considered working on different other recommendation proposed by JC&A.
At the center of the project, JC&A built a unique database that gathered information from the 29 inspectorates: The database also listed the 116 normative acts that currently frame the inspection functions of the State and provided the duplications and overlaps between the inspection functions. JC&A conducted focus groups with businesspersons to approximate the level of duplication and overlap between inspection bodies, the burden of inspection visits, as well as other issues confronting firms during inspections.
Tajikistan, ADB, 2016.
