heads of administrations and employees, and that in these meetings the Ministry’s representatives “got acquainted with the situation related to the implementation of the specified Articles of the Law on General Administrative Procedure, in a verbal and direct way”. Since the response does not state that the Ministry has used any of the legal powers available for controlling the legality of the work of administrative authorities, including to request reports and information on work, in order to establish the state of performed work, warn about the irregularities and determine measures and deadlines for their elimination, order the completion of tasks it considers necessary or initiate procedures to establish liability, it can be concluded that the oversight was reduced only to the implementation of certain project activities, and that the measures envisaged by the Law on Public Administration and the Law on Administrative Inspection were not undertaken.34 EXPERIENCES OF BENEFICIARIES: Since the implementation of the new provisions of the Law on General Administrative Procedure, Praxis has informed its beneficiaries, who requested various documents, about the content of the Law and instructed them to address (again) the authority before which they wanted to conduct a procedure and to tell the officials that they are obliged to obtain evidence ex officio. They have also been provided with these legal provisions in printed form, along with the official notifications and communications confirming that they are obliged to obtain evidence ex officio. After some time, the beneficiaries were contacted to follow up on the situation. In this way, we have learned the following: out of the total number of contacted beneficiaries (approximately one-third could not be contacted; the total number of examined beneficiaries is 116), the authorities accepted to obtain evidence ex officio for 74% of contacted beneficiaries, the authorities refused to do so for 16% of contacted beneficiaries, while in 10% of the cases the beneficiaries gave up requests because they were told that they would be waiting for a long time for the authority to obtain evidence. However, we should stress that all the beneficiaries examined in this way knew that the authority was obliged to obtain documents and that fact certainly contributed to the increased percentage of authorities that did obtain documents. This statement is supported by the information that in only 36% of the cases the officials offered to provide documents, while nearly two-thirds of the beneficiaries had to warn the officials about their duty to obtain documents. Therefore, if the beneficiaries had not been familiar with the officials’ duty to obtain documents and if they had not pointed to it – the evidence would have been obtained ex officio approximately only in every third case. Hence, it is not surprising that every second beneficiary said that he or she was not satisfied with the implementation of new provisions, and that only 31% of them were satisfied (others had a neutral opinion). It is disconcerting that in most cases the authorities did not offer to obtain evidence, but it is even more worrying that even in cases where the beneficiaries drew the officials’ attention to their duty, they often refused to obtain evidence (in 16% of cases). Some of their explanations were: "we are not in a network with other authorities", "we do not have time to provide documents" or in the case in which a beneficiary showed the printed Articles of the Law - "it is not binding on us". 34 See Article 47 of the Law on Public Administration (Official Gazette of RS, nos. 79/2005, 101/2007, 95/2010 and 99/2014) and Article 18 of the Law on Administrative Inspection (Official Gazette of RS, no. 87/2011) 24