On December 19 President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko signed decree No 689 “Measures to perfect auditing and supervisory activities in the Republic of Belarus”. The press service of the President told BelTA, at present major efforts are put into liberalising all areas of business in order to fulfil the instruction issued by the head of state. In view of multiple complaints of corporations about their inability to operate well due to an excessive number of audits, lack of their coordination between auditing bodies, enforcement of auditing using perfunctory reasons, and audits performed at will of auditing and supervisory agencies the head of state has decided to suspend the auditing and supervision of the operation of juridical persons and individual entrepreneurships. Ongoing audits, which have been registered, should be completed within 14 days. Auditing will be suspended till a special presidential decree, which is meant to introduce common regulations for auditing and supervisory activities in Belarus and to normalise and decrease the number of audits of corporations, is adopted. A limited number of audits can still be performed. First, audits initiated by the economic entity due to, for instance, its reorganisation or liquidation, are an exception. Second, juridical persons and individual entrepreneurships can be audited as part of legal proceedings or initiated administrative procedures or in order to prevent crimes and wrongdoing. In the latter case auditing can be authorised only by heads of the Tax Ministry (inspection departments in every oblast and Minsk), the State Control Committee (state control committees in every oblast), and the State Customs Committee, provided reliable information about a committed crime, a crime in progress or an administrative offence is available. Third, supervisory audits can be performed at hazardous production facilities. Such audits can be performed as part of the state sanitary control, state building supervision and human safety inspections. Even such supervisory audits can be carried out by the same state agency only 12 months after the previous audit of the same juridical person or individual entrepreneur. The time requirement can be bypassed only to prevent crimes in progress and crimes when reliable information about them is available. Fourth, the National Bank will continue auditing the operation of banks and non-banking credit and financial institutions as part of banking supervision. The head of state demanded that the new decree, which is supposed to be ready within six months and is meant to regulate auditing and supervisory activities, should minimise audits and even rule out them in some areas.

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