On January 31, the State Council Information Office held a press conference to stimulate the vitality of business entities and help high-quality economic development, Pu Chun, deputy director of the State Administration for Market Regulation, said that the State Administration for Market Regulation will strictly perform its duties in accordance with the law, fully incorporate administrative acts into the track of the rule of law, and create a more stable, transparent, standardized and predictable development environment for the majority of business entities. Pu Chun stressed that it is necessary to speed up the improvement of the standards for the discretion of administrative punishment in market supervision, establish and implement a case guidance system, and prevent problems such as "small and excessive punishments" and "different punishments for similar cases".
To stimulate economic vitality, it is inseparable from the dedication of various business entities, including both "towering trees" and obscure "grassroots".
At this press conference, the relevant person in charge of the State Administration for Market Regulation revealed that with the joint efforts of all regions, relevant departments and all sectors of society, the overall development of individual industrial and commercial households across the country has been stable and improving, and the level of activity and revenue has achieved "double improvement". According to the data, 2,258 new individual industrial and commercial households will be established in 202320,000 households, a year-on-year increase of 114%；By the end of 2023, there will be 12.4 billion households, accounting for 67 percent of the total number of business entities4%, supporting the employment of nearly 300 million people.
As the "capillaries" of the industrial chain and consumption chain and the "nerve endings" of the market, the stable development of individual industrial and commercial households has kept the fireworks in the streets and alleys, maintained the livelihood of hundreds of millions of families, and also demonstrated the strong vitality and resilience of China's economy.
By thanking the contributions of various economic agents, it is important to help them solve the problems that matter most. Among these problems, "small and heavy punishments" and "different punishments for similar cases" are obviously at the forefront of attention.
Self-employed "sold 5 catties of celery and was fined 660,000 yuan" case was a sensation, and then the *** inspection team disclosed that after checking the ledger of food administrative penalties of the market supervision bureau of a city in the north since 2021, it was found that among the 50 penalties imposed by the law enforcement department on small and micro market entities in the city, there were more than 20 fines of more than 50,000 yuan, and the case value was only tens or hundreds of yuan. It is even more common for cases of similar nature and circumstances to be dealt with differently at different times and in different places.
"Small and heavy punishments" are common, and "big and small punishments" cannot be ignored.
On January 28, a blogger posted that he encountered **"ghost scales" in Hangzhou. * shows that the blogger is ready to sell the gold necklace to the merchant of ***, and the other party weighs 62 grams, and then he takes out his own electronic scale on the spot and weighs it, and the result shows that it is 77 grams, a difference of 15 grams. After the intervention of the regulatory department, the investigation confirmed that the electronic scale used by the merchant was unqualified and there were illegal modifications. The penalty result was confiscation of the electronic scale and a fine of 22,000 yuan.
Such a punishment has also sparked heated discussions on the Internet. Is it reasonable to use a measuring instrument for the purpose of deceiving consumers for a long time, and only calculate the value of the case based on a single order reported by the consumer on the spot? Some netizens believe that the reason why the "ghost scale" has been repeatedly banned is that the punishment is too small.
As the person in charge of the State Administration for Market Regulation said at the press conference, "The rule of law is the best business environment and the fundamental guarantee for stimulating vitality and regulating order." In the final analysis, the goal of preventing problems such as "small and excessively heavy punishments" and "different punishments for similar cases" is to restrain the abuse of administrative power, and the difficulty lies in standardizing the discretionary power of administrative punishment.
On July 21, 2022, the General Office of ** issued the "Opinions on Further Standardizing the Formulation and Management of Administrative Discretion Benchmarks", stating that in the process of formulating administrative discretion benchmarks, local governments and their departments can refer to the relevant provisions of places similar to the economic development level and population size of the region, and at the same time emphasize that it is necessary to reasonably refine the specific circumstances and quantify the range of fines in accordance with the law, resolutely avoid arbitrary fines, and strictly prohibit the use of fines to generate income. It is strictly forbidden to rank the amount of fines or use them as an indicator for performance evaluation.
The above comments provide a relatively quantifiable and easy-to-operate standard. Combined with this standard, with transparent law enforcement actions, and insisting on exposing administrative punishments to the sun, we can enable grassroots law enforcement efforts to achieve a proportionate punishment and a combination of leniency and severity, so as to avoid being unusually light and unfair.
To correct problems such as "different punishments for similar cases," it is also advisable to rely on the power of administrative procuratorial supervision. At present, there have been cases in which the procuratorial organs have intervened, finally corrected, and initiated the pursuit of responsibility in many localities, and it is believed that there will be more practice in the future.