In 2021, 20,960 typescript pages of the highest-order legal acts were adopted in Poland, which means an increase by 40% y / y, according to the Grant Thornton’s “Legal Barometer” report. This is one of the highest results in the last three decades.
In 2021, an average of 85 days was worked on a single act. This is, respectively, 8 and 16 days more than in 2019 and 2020, and this is due to the fact that the Senate is working on bills for an increasing amount of time. In the remaining stages of work on bills, the time of work continues to shorten – MPs have less and less time to familiarize themselves with bills, and parliamentary committees work less and less time on amendments, it was reported.
“It seems that we are constantly approaching the limits of legal flexibility and, without a significant change in the philosophy of lawmaking, we will soon fall into a deep regulatory crisis, which means the inability of both legal entities and bodies responsible for its enforcement, to assimilate and comply with the legal framework of functioning in Poland,” said Grzegorz Maślanko, attorney-at-law, partner in the team at Grant Thornton.
According to the company, the so-called Polish Order. According to the analysis by Grant Thornton, 8 out of 9 acts implementing this reform were enacted in violation of the law (breaking the provisions of the Regulations of the Council of Ministers’ work), and in the case of none of them reliable public consultations were conducted (either they were not carried out at all or they were facade).
The dizzying pace of work on the laws of the Polish Deal was even more clearly visible in the parliament. Although – as the government representatives themselves pointed out – the Polish Deal was a deep, multi-area and substantively complex reform, the average time of working on 9 bills was only 53 days. This is 32 days less. than the average for acts passed by the parliament in 2021. It is also about 70 days less than in the case of the average economic act of 2010 or the aforementioned act on succession management, Grant Thornton reported.
The average period of vacatio legis, i.e. the time given to citizens and organizations to adapt to changes in regulations, was 43 days for the 9 acts implementing the Polish Order. This is 13 days less than the average for all draft acts from 2021 and 30 days less than the average for economic acts from the period 2005-2015. It is also worth noting that for two “Polish tax” acts (the “smaller” tax act and the local government act), vacatio legis practically did not exist, and for the next two (concerning changes for farmers and changes in health care) it was 14 days.
Source: Grant Thornton and ISBnews
