Submission of Applications of Citizens Through the Unified Portal of State and Municipal Services: Problems and Implementation Paths

From January 1, 2025, the provisions of the Federal Law “On the Procedure for Considering Appeals from Citizens of the Russian Federation” come into full force. They allow the use of the Unified Portal of State and Municipal Services for citizens to submit appeals, and also allow applicants to receive responses to them. Meanwhile, neither the methodological, nor the technological, nor the regulatory conditions for the implementation of the new form for submitting citizen appeals were initially defined. The practice of the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation to adapt the digital Feedback Platform “Let’s Decide Together” to receive citizen appeals contradicts certain legislative norms. This causes misunderstanding on the part of government bodies. Addressees of citizen appeals, as well as the prosecutor’s office, as the authority supervising compliance with the legislation on citizen appeals, do not understand how to properly consider appeals. The article analyzes the features of the experiment of the Government of the Russian Federation on the introduction of the institution of messages submitted through the Feedback Platform. The Feedback Platform is an alternative to the institution of traditional appeals. Other reasons that complicate the implementation of an innovative way of working with appeals are studied. It has been proven that the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation, contrary to the direct instructions of the Government of the Russian Federation, has not developed or tested a mechanism for submitting citizens’ requests through the Unified Portal of State and Municipal Services. Due to the premature adoption of the amendments, the Ministry was forced to adapt the Feedback Platform to receive citizens’ requests, while maintaining the ability to submit messages on it. In practice, this entailed an unlawful transfer of the features of working with messages to citizens’ requests. The authors substantiate two options for resolving the contradiction that has arisen: 1) legislative allocation of messages as a type of request and the introduction of parallel mechanisms for submitting messages and requests through the Unified Portal of State and Municipal Services, or 2) abandoning the institution of messages and transforming the Feedback Platform into a channel for receiving and processing exclusively requests.