NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS IN PUBLIC MONITORING: LEGAL REGULATION AND PRACTICE OF APPLICATION

Abstract

Non-profit organizations, as a part of civil society, are empowered to provide feedback between authorities and the public. The mechanism of public control allows for different approaches to define these organizations as non-profit or non-governmental, but this division does not have a significant impact on their activities.

 Non-profit organizations are substantially active in measures of public monitoring. The legislative procedure for conducting public monitoring allows for differences in the regulation of the rules for initiating and financing its activities. The most popular direction is public monitoring of the quality of public services, which is carried out on the initiative of non-profit organizations or through conducting public procurement by the authorized body on the basis of the state social order.

Legal regulation of the procedure for conducting public monitoring, as it was defined in the study, contains certain gaps. In particular, the system of legislation does not have an approved by a regulatory legal act methodology or procedure for conducting public monitoring, including target directions. Besides that, legislative acts allow for discrepancies in the definition of public monitoring and provide insufficient authority for non-profit organizations to conduct it. In addition, the regulatory requirements for the content of conclusions on the results of public monitoring do not reflect all of its directions.

The analysis of the practice of public monitoring also revealed some violations. On the one hand, it is established that, despite legal restrictions on the subject structure and the procedure for organizing the financing of public monitoring, local executive bodies conduct their own purchases on the basis of the state social order, conclude contracts with commercial organizations, and replace the subject of purchases from «public monitoring» to «social research». In another case, despite the requirement for annual public publication of the findings of the monitoring of normative legal acts, the results of the monitoring are not published, which could indicate the absence of evidence it was conducted.

Identified in this study issues of legal regulation of the activities of non-profit organizations in conducting public monitoring and the features of the current practice of its application might be taken into account in the legislative work on improving the current legislation.