A Heavy Workload for the NACP: The European Commission’s Assessment

Earlier this month, the European Commission released a report containing a number of recommendations aimed at improving the work of the NACP. What is their essence, and do these concerns align with civil society’s assessment?

It should be stated upfront that, compared to last year’s Enlargement Report on Ukraine, this year the European Commission adopted a far more critical stance in its assessment of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP). The European commissioners reviewed virtually the entire mandate of the Agency — from anti-corruption policymaking to lobbying regulation.

Overall, the European Commission noted that the NACP continues to play a central role in shaping anti-corruption policy and preventing corruption. At the same time, however, European experts voiced concerns regarding the Agency’s impartiality and effectiveness in certain functions. This assessment appears particularly relevant today, following the publication of the so-called “Mindich tapes,” which, as a reminder, included references to the delivery of a USD 20,000 bribe to someone within the NACP. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that, at the request of the Public Council under the NACP, the Head of the Agency, Viktor Pavlushchyk, pledged to launch an internal investigation into the possible involvement of the institution in the corruption scandal surrounding Energoatom JSC. Yet, under conditions of high-quality and genuinely transparent NACP operations, such facts should be entirely impossible.

Transparency International Ukraine has analyzed what concrete changes the European Commission expects from the NACP in order to align the Agency’s work more closely with EU requirements

Overall effectiveness

First and foremost, it is important to recall that the NACP became the first anti-corruption authority to undergo a comprehensive independent evaluation. More than two years ago, the first audit of the Agency was conducted, within which experts assessed the effectiveness of its activities for 2020–2021. At that time, despite the institutional reset, auditors deliberately used a double negative in their conclusions, stating that “the NACP’s performance during the assessment period generally did not reach the threshold of ineffectiveness”. At the same time, they issued numerous recommendations aimed at improving the Agency’s performance.

It is precisely these recommendations that the European Commission has now urged the NACP to implement as a matter of urgency, given that since their publication the Agency has, in effect, failed to comment on the extent to which they have been taken into account. The European Commission also recalled that the next performance evaluation of the NACP must be conducted without delay, while applying a robust methodology and clear criteria. We fully share the priority accorded to these recommendations. Moreover, Draft Law No. 14209 has recently been registered, aimed at accelerating the process of conducting a new audit of the Agency — a step that unquestionably deserves support.

The EU also underscored a long-standing issue concerning the improper internal regulation of the NACP’s operations. Specifically, European commissioners stressed that the Agency in particular needs to ensure that its internal processes are regulated through binding bylaws instead of through non-binding recommendations or similar documents, as is currently the case. This issue has repeatedly been highlighted both in the NACP audit report and in our own analytical work.

The European Commission also addressed the issue of the NACP’s anti-corruption review of draft legislation. In its view, such reviews are currently unsystematic, while the recommendations issued by the Agency as a result are not implemented consistently by Parliament. In this context, particular attention is drawn to the problem of the NACP’s excessive discretion in selecting draft laws for review. For example, precisely for this reason, in July the Agency did not even attempt to initiate its own anti-corruption review of the notorious Draft Law No. 12414, which sought to deprive NABU and SAPO of their independence, citing the absence of external requests for such a review.

The Enlargement Report also justifiably raised the issue of the NACP’s insufficient human resources. It notes that attracting and retaining qualified staff requires competitive salary levels, as well as a clear internal HR policy and the strengthening of the skills of anti-corruption officers. Moreover, since this year the Agency has established sector-specific expert units, these units should now be authorized to provide additional methodological support to anti-corruption units and officials within public authorities and state-owned enterprises. 

In the section dealing with effectiveness, the European Commission also indicated that the number of corruption reports received by the NACP increased significantly — from 534 in 2023 to 982 in 2024. At the same time, however, the number of confirmed whistleblowers dropped from 25 in 2023 to 17 in 2024. Furthermore, an extremely small number of individuals were convicted in criminal proceedings based on such whistleblower reports — 0.47% of cases at the level of ordinary courts and 5% in proceedings before the HACC. In our view, this is primarily linked to deficiencies in the functioning of the Unified Whistleblower Reporting Portal, which is also mentioned in the European Commission’s report.

Finally, the European Commission stressed that the NACP must develop its capacity for the effective and impartial monitoring of compliance with lobbying legislation. This is a new area for Ukrainian law and practice, one that clearly requires additional attention.

E-declarations and lifestyle monitoring

However, the European Commission’s top-priority recommendations primarily concern asset declaration. After the mandatory submission of declarations was reinstated in 2023, public demand for their high-quality verification increased in proportion to growing intolerance toward corruption during the full-scale war. Yet, the results have failed to meet these expectations.

Time and again, we read about high-profile corruption scandals and about how the NACP failed to detect them at the stage of verifying officials’ declarations. In addition to last year’s well-known scandal involving the head of the Medical and Social Expert Commission, Tetiana Krupa, we are now awaiting information from the NACP regarding the verification of the declarations of those involved in the corruption scandal surrounding Energoatom.

These and other cases give grounds to doubt the effectiveness of the existing financial control tools used by the NACP in the verification of declarations. We have previously criticized the Agency’s new approach to automating full verifications, and the emergence of new corruption scandals only reinforces this position.

That is why it is particularly important that the European Commission’s report also refers to the need to strengthen the e-declaration system so that it can truly and effectively prevent and detect unexplained assets. The Commission pointed out that the system has practical and legal shortcomings, primarily related to the automated verification process. 

The Commission also noted the need to ensure a certain degree of external oversight over the logical and arithmetic control (LAC) of declarations. As early as 2021, we urged the Agency to make the LAC rules public, since it is precisely these rules that determine the risk level of a declaration and its subsequent selection for verification. Nearly five years have passed, yet the NACP has still failed to heed this call, and it remains impossible to assess whether the established rules are sufficiently effective.

Once again, the European Commission rightly called for expanding the list of declarants to include staff of private offices — such as assistants to Members of Parliament, employees of the Office of the President, and others.

Despite its criticism of the e-declaration system, the report gives a positive assessment of the effectiveness and results of lifestyle monitoring of public officials. TI Ukraine does not share this view, as the current lifestyle monitoring procedure is not properly regulated and, in essence, duplicates the substance of full declaration verification. 

Overall, the Commission stressed that greater attention must be paid to the practical application of financial control tools to high-level officials — a position with which it is difficult to disagree. Likewise, we support the recommendation for Parliament to further increase penalties for unexplained assets and to reduce the applicable thresholds to make the sanctions regime more relevant and effective.

Anti-Corruption Strategy and the State Anti-Corruption Programme

As for strategic documents, the European Commission assessed the impact of the current Anti-Corruption Strategy and the State Anti-Corruption Programme (SAP) as limited. In our view, this result is primarily due to the fact that the NACP cannot directly influence the implementers of the measures and likewise lacks instruments to incentivize and control the implementation of the SAP. At the same time, the implementers of the anti-corruption program themselves lack sufficient political will for its proper execution.

At the same time, the Commission called for the prompt development and adoption of a new Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026–2030 and a new State Anti-Corruption Programme, to be prepared in a transparent and inclusive manner. These documents should include an ambitious yet realistic level of priority measures in areas most prone to corruption. To avoid implementation problems under the future strategy, institutional capacity and resources, particularly at the level of the NACP, must be strengthened. All of these recommendations echo those outlined in our Shadow Report.

However, in our view, it is also essential to introduce a minimum implementation threshold for the State Anti-Corruption Programme. According to the most recent OECD report, a SAP can be considered effective only if 90% of its measures have been implemented, while the remaining 10% have either justifiably lost relevance or remain unimplemented for financial reasons. This is precisely the benchmark that the NACP and the authorities as a whole should strive to achieve.

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Among the systemic shortcomings that have been undermining the effective work of the NACP for years, it is possible to clearly identify those related to the organization of its internal operations — shortcomings that the Agency is fully capable of addressing. Yet year after year, the institution chooses not to do so, despite the regular repetition of relevant recommendations both from civil society and in the conclusions of the independent audit. 

These very same recommendations have now been reiterated in this year’s EU Enlargement Report. The Agency no longer has any room to evade this criticism and must finally heed it. First and foremost, it is necessary to rectify the systemic deficiencies in financial control, ensure the high-quality and timely adoption of new strategic documents, and, at last, conduct a new audit of the Agency’s operational effectiveness.

Importantly, even if the Agency were to be provided with all the necessary resources and additional powers, the effective use of these instruments would still depend entirely on its internal system of work. Without changing the existing approaches, we will continue to hear about corruption scandals that the very institution tasked with preventing corruption has failed to prevent.

The Shadow Report was prepared by a coalition of civil society organisations, led by the Agency for Legislative Initiatives, within the framework of the EU Project Pravo-Justice grant, implemented by Expertise France. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the European Union.