Control and supervisory bodies develop and implement programs for preventing violations of mandatory requirements of regulatory legal acts, as well as requirements established by municipal legal acts, the control  (supervision) of which they exercise. Due to the fact that preventive activities are carried out at the expense of the budgets of the budget system of the Russian Federation, an assessment of the effectiveness of their spending is necessary. However, at present, there are no criteria and methods for assessing the effectiveness of the preventive activities of the control and supervision bodies. This article attempts to search for indicators by which it would be possible to assess the effectiveness of the preventive activities of the control and oversight bodies, in connection with which, the authors examined the regulatory legal basis of this activity, assessed the emerging practice of introducing legislative novels into the activities of individual control and oversight bodies, chose from an array of statistical data provided annually by the regulatory authorities, those indicators which, in the authors’ opinion, should be influenced by preventive performance. A study of the regulatory legal framework for prevention showed that today there is no legislative certainty regarding the subject of prevention (this includes violations of mandatory requirements, harm (damage), the risk of harm (damage), and natural and man-made emergencies). According to the results of the study, it was concluded that the preventive function is implemented at the present stage to a large extent formally, an indepth study of even the most advanced examples does not allow us to argue that the successful registration of resources on the Internet created to provide a preventive effect on legal entities and individual entrepreneurs corresponds to their content. The article provides a brief description of possible models for assessing the effectiveness of preventive activities, as well as the ideas of sociological research as practice has been developed.