Today’s blog post comes from RosZhKH. Take a look at this piece by the project’s director, Dmitry Taralov, where he shares some quite interesting statistics on the project’s work over the past year and a half.
And thank you for using RosZhKH!
The director of the RosZhKH project is Dmitry Taralov.
Just recently, during the May holidays (the long public holiday period around early May in Russia), the “RosZhKH” project turned a year and a half old. A perfect occasion to sum up some of our work.
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Let me briefly recap what the project is. RosZhKH is an automated service for filing reports of administrative violations with government agencies. You choose a standard problem from the list, describe it briefly, enter your address, and a formal submission citing the relevant laws is sent to the authorities in your region.
It all sounds fairly simple, but of course real life is much more complicated than it seems. Government agencies are generally not very eager to review these submissions in the first place, and in some regions, applications sent through RosZhKH have been met with especially warm “affection.” For example, RosZhKH and St. Petersburg clearly do not get along—the local housing inspectorate does not seem to want to work at all. By contrast, somewhat surprisingly, things have gone quite well with Oryol Region.
After a person receives a brush-off response, they usually contact us through social media or by email, and if we can, we help that applicant draft a complaint about the actions of the authorities.
Over my year and a half working on the project, I have probably assembled the largest collection of excuses and boilerplate replies in Russia. In some regions, the absence of sanitary cleaning in apartment building entrances is not even considered an administrative violation.
In some places, they believe that only the owner of an apartment can file a report of an administrative violation. And most commonly of all, government agencies almost everywhere treat a report of an administrative violation as an ordinary complaint and respond in ways that are very much at odds with what the Code of Administrative Offenses prescribes.
We fight all this bureaucratic shirking, but unfortunately we do not always succeed.
At this point, I’d like to pause the lyrical part a bit and move on to the hard numbers. Over the lifetime of the project, we have received 154,292 initial complaints. Users marked 57,881 complaints as “resolved”, which amounts to 38 percent.
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We believe the real percentage of resolved complaints is somewhat higher, because some users simply do not bother going back to the site to update the status when their complaint has been resolved. But in any case, 38% is the minimum real resolution rate for complaints submitted through RosZhKH.
Overall, we consider that a satisfactory result.
A special table shows data for all regions of the Russian Federation where more than 100 complaints were submitted.
You can view the full table here.
A note on Samara Region: more than a year ago, submissions started arriving from there in huge numbers—500 to 700 a day. A decision was made to approve them. But users did not follow up on those complaints afterward, and the authorities, apparently, were not exactly enthusiastic about such a flood of submissions either. As a result, Samara Region has the worst percentage among all regions, but it should not be used as a basis for any conclusions.
So, what does this table tell us? First, the entirely predictable leaders in terms of complaints submitted were Moscow, Moscow Region, and St. Petersburg.
Second, the percentage of resolved complaints ranges from 30 percent (Astrakhan Region) to 52 percent (Irkutsk Region). In the overwhelming majority of regions, the percentage of resolved submissions falls between 40 and 50 percent. From this, I conclude that where the figure is below 35 percent, government agencies are not just performing badly—they are performing atrociously. These include the already mentioned Astrakhan Region (30%), Magadan Region (30%), Khabarovsk Krai, Murmansk Region (32%), Chuvashia and Leningrad Region (33%), and Novgorod, Amur, Voronezh, Volgograd, and Kamchatka Krai (35%).
There are also regions where government agencies work surprisingly well. These include Oryol, Ryazan, and Lipetsk Regions (51%), Irkutsk Region (52%), and Khakassia. Khakassia has the highest nominal percentage—56 percent—but only 187 complaints were submitted from there.
The leaders in the number of submissions turned out to be only middling when it came to results: 41 percent were resolved in Moscow and Moscow Region, and 40 percent in St. Petersburg. The table also separately presents data for the country’s five largest cities. The comparison between Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod is particularly interesting. Siberians clearly still have room to improve.
Overall, it is safe to say that RosZhKH has proven its effectiveness over the past year and a half. But there are many areas for growth that would allow the project to operate even more effectively. We are working on them, and we will tell you more about them soon.
People