Simplify Legi

Identified challenge

As part of the legislative process, the initiating party of a regulatory/legislative project is expected to conduct an analysis of the existing regulatory/legislative framework in order to avoid inconsistencies and duplication. Currently, this legal research involves autonomous and manual fine-tuning activities. The existing regulatory/legislative framework can be vast and complex, implying that the analysis work of the initiating party is demanding and can represent a considerable workload.

Currently, the different administrative procedures within the existing regulatory/legislative framework are not mapped. Therefore, the identification of the interactions or links between the different texts containing the administrative procedures is even more challenging. As a result, the complexity of a specific administrative procedure needs to be identified and visualised.

The objective of administrative simplification is to reduce the complexity of administrative procedures for use by administrations, citizens or companies. Within the framework of administrative simplification, it is therefore necessary to identify administrative procedures and to classify them by order of complexity with the aim of analysing administrative procedures for possible adaptations.

The life cycle of a legislative/regulatory act is predefined and includes the following steps as an example:

• Identification of the need to legislate,
• drafting of a normative text to meet the identified need together with any required and necessary argumentation (e.g. explanation of reasons, various impact assessments, explanatory notes to the articles) ,
• analysis of the existing normative framework (e.g. reference to existing norms, relationship with existing norms that may need to be adapted).

Currently, each administration involved in this cycle carries out the steps of the legislative/regulatory cycle under review according to its own internal procedures.

Therefore, it appears that a certain level of standardisation and pooling would contribute to a reduction of the complexity at this level.

The proposed approach should include as a priority :

• the determination of the concept of an administrative procedure,
• the detection of the latter in the regulatory texts as well as
• the detection of the level of complexity of an administrative procedure via
• the implementation of this detection in a tool based on artificial intelligence or other technology.