Personal experience
Regularly using taxi services in one of the regions of the Volga Federal District, the author of these lines interviewed representatives of the taxi service for two weeks. The general portrait of the taxi driver participating in the mini-survey was as follows: a man, 45 years old, without higher education, married, has two children, previously worked in another field, for example, in trade, now is forced to engage in taxi service, does not have the status of self-employed. The OSAGO policy is issued, but this is a regular driver’s insurance. Mandatory and daily pre-trip medical examination and technical inspection, as a rule, do not take place – they explain that there is simply nowhere to do this, especially if you work in the evening or at night. At the same time, aggregators do not refuse to cooperate with such a taxi driver: otherwise, the car fleet may thin out considerably, and prices – soar.
What’s the problem?
Monitoring of the actual practice of applying Federal Law No. 580 “On taxi” in the regions shows that one of the problems in this area was the lack of a unified regulation methodology and platform, says expert Valery Korneev, Chairman of the ANO “Union of Users of Digital Platforms Digital World”.
“The regulations for providing the public service for inclusion in the regional register of passenger taxis of carriers and taxi ordering services also differ. In some places, administrative regulations are not even published, which makes the requirements for future taxi drivers unclear and creates additional administrative barriers. At the same time, in a number of subjects of the Russian Federation, by-laws seem to establish requirements for the procedure for maintaining regional registers, but the registers themselves are not maintained separately from the federal FGIS “Taxi”. There is no single digital platform or software, and, given the current lack of connection between regional databases and insurance company databases, in fact, access for self-employed individuals and individual entrepreneurs to the taxi carrier market is becoming impossible,” adds Anton Palyulin, expert and representative of the law firm.
The law firm Palyulin and Partners, which conducted an analysis of the law enforcement practice in the regions, explained the situation as follows: “In the conditions of subsidiary liability of a taxi ordering service with a carrier – a self-employed person or an individual entrepreneur, in the event of actual damage not covered by insurance (subparagraph 3 of paragraph 2 of Article 29 of Federal Law No. 580-FZ) and joint liability (subparagraph 1 of paragraph 2 of the same article) with a person whose transportation permit was canceled or suspended, and in the absence of automatic exchange of information between the databases of taxi registers, insurance companies and the Ministry of Internal Affairs for checking criminal records, this can happen at any time and even retroactively, the self-employed are not needed either for taxi ordering services or for taxi companies, since the risks for them when interacting with them cannot be calculated.” Simply put, there was simply no place for the self-employed in the system.
The same requirements cannot be imposed on taxis in a regional center of Central Siberia and taxis in the capital. For example, the requirement for daily medical and technical inspections is far from real life in the regions, experts point out. If Moscow can afford remote diagnostics, then even in the center of a remote subject of the Russian Federation this is often impossible.
“It is not the state, but drivers, carriers and taxi services, under threat of increased legal liability, that must exercise control and take adequate measures to prevent people from driving while in a sick state or driving a faulty, uninsured or dirty car,” notes Vyacheslav Plahotniuc, a doctor of law at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and a lawyer.
“A self-employed person will have to pay for the extremely expensive repainting or re-coating of his car in the right color at his own expense. And in the overwhelming majority of populated areas of the country there is no place to physically undergo a daily medical examination, as well as a daily technical inspection of the car before going out on the road, due to the lack of appropriate medical workers and professional technical inspection stations,” says Petr Shkumatov, head of the working group of the NF “Protection of Motorists’ Rights”.
Photo: Valery Sharifulin / TASS
Self-employed people wrote a letter
The self-employed also say the same thing. Here is what the president of the public organization “Association of the Self-Employed of Russia” Igor Zhmakin wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister: today there are two models of taxi work in the country – taxi companies that rent out cars, often to migrants who are only required to have a license, and self-employed Russians. Zhmakin believes that these are economically unequal models that have been equalized in responsibilities.
“In such a situation, the majority of self-employed people considered it economically impossible for them to fulfill all these requirements. As a result: out of more than 600 thousand officially registered self-employed people who indicated working as a taxi driver as their main activity, only 20 thousand, or slightly more than 3%, received permission in accordance with the requirements of the taxi law,” the activist states.
The Digital World Union of Digital Platform Users found out the opinion of 28 thousand taxi drivers. It turned out that most of the respondents are ready to “carry passengers” unofficially if they cannot meet the requirements of Federal Law 580. “A survey of individual taxi drivers showed that about 72% of taxi drivers are ready to go back into the shadow economy if they start to tighten the screws and demand the purchase of additional OSAGO and OSGOP. They cannot meet other requirements that taxi drivers do not have money for, and part-time work is extremely important for their family budget,” Valery Korneev commented on the survey results.
What could be the way out?
Natalia Lozinskaya, executive director of the National Taxi Council Association, believes that answers to a number of pressing issues can be found by abandoning the outdated requirements of the 1960s – 1980s. The Ministry of Transport sees the problems and recently published a draft order that could soften the requirements in the future. The industry needs digital transformation, digital control, says Lozinskaya. She is supported by Korneev, who believes that with the help of digital platform solutions it is possible to bring regional and federal regulation to a single structure so that it ensures the transparency of tax revenues and does not complicate the attraction of the economically active population. And there is only one way out – to openly and publicly discuss the necessary changes, reduce excessive legislative pressure taking into account the new economic realities, the expert is sure.
Photo: Gavriil Grigorov / TASS
Source: rg.ru
