The first head of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention was appointed a year ago today.
In the meantime, a lot has happened: both positive and not so much.
Some of the Agency’s activities, e.g., development of the Anti-Corruption Strategy or assisting officials in filling out declarations, were warmly supported by the TI Ukraine. The NACP leadership has expressed a willingness to structurally change both the approaches to preventing corruption and its work principles in this direction.
But at the same time, we believe that the NACP proposed some negative initiatives as well. In this context, we should mention, for example, a change of declaration verification processes or implementation format of monitoring the lifestyle of declarants, which we reasonably criticized.
But, of course, the main blow for both the NACP and the entire anti-corruption community was the infamous decision of the Constitutional Court, which took away part of the powers of the National Agency. Fortunately, these powers were restored on New Year’s Eve. And we are very much looking forward to the results that the Agency will demonstrate after the resumption of its functions. After all, there are new challenges and a lot of work ahead.
In any case, we can already say that the NACP a year ago and the NACP now seem to be two different state structures. This concerns the approaches to work and the desire for change.
And even more about the problems identified by experts and representatives of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention over the past year can be found in a comprehensive study of anti-corruption infrastructure bodies’ capacity by the Transparency International Ukraine. We have provided relevant recommendations to improve this institution’s capacity, and we will closely monitor the implementation of these recommendations in 2021.
We hope for future cooperation!
