REFORM SC HOLARS - THINKING OUTSIDE THE SANDBOX

One of the key findings of the UK governments’ Business Perceptions Survey 2022 is that over two fifths of businesses felt that regulation is “an obstacle to success”, which is “significantly higher than the proportion of businesses who agree in 2020”.15 The bulk of the concern was not about the level of regulation per se, but on the complexity of the rules and the resultant challenge of complying. [...] Utah has become the first American state to establish a general-purpose sandbox, administered by a government department called the Office of Regulatory Relief, or ORR, which manages the sandbox and provides advice to participants.27 Entrepreneurs with novel business concepts are able to seek guidance from the ORR to assess their eligibility for the program and identify the regulations from which. [...] The ORR, along with the relevant state agency, would jointly select sandbox participants, with the ORR engaging in dialogue with applicants to finalize decisions and manage the terms of the sandbox trial, which lasts one year with the possibility of extension. [...] This committee would comprise of five generalists, who would review each application and send it to a specialist in the relevant field to decide whether or not to progress to the testing phase should it satisfy the requirements of the sandbox. [...] For added transparency and provision of information to customers, relevant information of all approved Sandbox applications such as the name of the applicant, the start and expiry dates of the sandbox experimentation and a broad description of the program would be published on the Regulatory Relief Unit’s website.