Control, and to a lesser extent supervision, are concepts that have been used and continue to be used in cooperative legislation throughout all Polish cooperative laws, from the 1920 Act to the currently applicable (and frequently amended) 1982 Act. The same applies to the so-called internal cooperative law, i.e., the statutes of cooperatives, regardless of their type or the kind of business activity they conduct. However, the issue of controlling cooperative activities has not yet been extensively covered in the literature on Polish cooperative law. This is particularly true regarding the control by cooperative members and the self-governing bodies of the cooperative composed of its members.

An analysis of legal solutions, both statutory and statutory […] seems to indicate a very clear trend towards progressively expanding the control rights of members. In this context, it is somewhat paradoxical that the number of disputes and the search for their resolution in court is systematically increasing. Upon closer examination of specific situations, it often turns out that cooperative members did not utilize their control rights provided by the statutes, which could have reduced the number of disputes brought to court or even eliminated them.

The starting point for the considerations in this publication is an analysis of a rich normative material. This includes primarily statutory legal acts, as well as the relatively few executive regulations issued based on cooperative law provisions. The analysis also covered a relatively broad base of cooperative statutes of various types, which are a fundamental component of the so-called internal cooperative law.