The State Audit lacks attention when assessing the impact of adopted and amended legislative acts

When amending or adopting new legal acts in Lithuania, insufficient attention is paid to their impact assessment, according to the audit conducted by the State Audit Office.

“The assessment of the impact of legal regulation would be more effective if more detailed assessments of the expected impact of legal regulation were carried out for all priority legislative initiatives. During the audit, we found that only 26 percent was carried out. a more detailed ex ante assessment of priority legislative initiatives, which must be carried out. Thus, a part of the legal regulation that can have a significant impact on the society remains an undervalued part,” state controller Mindaugas Macijauskas is quoted as saying in the report.

According to the State Audit Office, the impact of priority legislative initiatives should be assessed according to their impact on specific areas, state finances, administrative burden and economy, but the impact of none of the priority legislative initiatives was assessed in all mandatory aspects.

When adopting new legislative initiatives, the administrative burden was often underestimated, and no cost-benefit analysis was carried out in any case.

According to the State Audit Institution, Lithuania is distinguished from other European Union countries by the extremely large and growing number of registered legislative initiatives. In 2020-2023, 2,469 legal acts were adopted, of which 7 percent – new version of the laws.

The audit results show that 22 percent in the case of priority legislative initiatives, public consultations were not used, so stakeholders were not given the opportunity to participate in this process. This misses the opportunity to fully evaluate the possible ways of solving public policy problems in search of the best possible solutions that meet the needs of society.

According to the National Audit Office, quality control of impact assessments before the adoption of laws must be strengthened in order to find out whether the planned legislative initiative is justified. Although quality control of all priority legislative initiatives must be carried out, according to the State Audit Office, 41 percent these initiatives have not been implemented.

The institution also notes that it is important to reasonably assess the need to carry out an evaluation of priority legislative initiatives after they have already been adopted.

“This would help to assess whether the goals that were pursued by the legal regulation have been achieved and what the consequences of the legal regulation have been,” the report states.

According to the State Audit Office, after the Government Chancellery implements the recommendations, more detailed evaluations of the anticipated impact of the legal regulation of all priority legislative initiatives will be planned and conducted, on the basis of which the prepared legal acts will better respond to the identified public policy problems.

Then, according to the control, the quality control of legal regulatory impact assessments will ensure the performance of impact assessments in all necessary aspects, the ministries will accumulate the competences needed to carry out impact assessments, this will contribute to the preparation of higher quality legal acts.