On the legal regulation of environmental audit

This article discusses the issues of legal regulation of environmental audit as a procedure for independent assessment of the environmental activities of enterprises and organizations and the negative impact of business entities on the environment. Attention is also paid to the goals and objectives of this legal mechanism as one of the types of preventive regulation in the field of environmental protection. The subject of the research were acts of a normative and non-normative nature containing any norms on environmental audit: the Federal Law "On Environmental Protection", decrees of the President of the Russian Federation, international and Russian standards. Special attention was paid to the issues of mandatory environmental audit, due to the fact that different authors divide environmental audit into such types as voluntary and mandatory, by analogy with financial audit. In order to study this legal mechanism, we have reviewed the laws and regulations of the Russian Federation, as well as international standards, and conducted a comparative analysis of them. It is shown that despite the obvious advantages of conducting an audit – both for the organization itself (reducing external costs, identifying and eliminating the causes of environmental offenses) and for maintaining a favorable environmental quality, this mechanism practically does not work in Russia due to the lack of detailed legal regulation. Based on the results of the review of legal acts in which there are norms on environmental audit, it can be noted that such norms are only declarative in nature, do not have any implementation mechanisms. In terms of mandatory and voluntary audits, it is concluded that there are no requirements for mandatory environmental audit in Russian legislation. At the same time, the lack of regulation of the mechanism for the implementation of environmental audit and the requirements for the procedure for its conduct create certain difficulties for enterprises making decisions on voluntary environmental audit.