“What is the point of those e-declarations if they don’t work?” says my friend, indignant, scrolling Facebook over coffee. “The register is stuffed to the gills, and nothing happens. What on earth do they do in that Agency?”
I can relate to his irritation. The NACP has verified a bit over three hundred e-declarations out of 2.5 million, which could cause a huge upheaval in the country.
The problems with verification have been pointed out by international partners, too, multiple times. Even the NABU, which generally has a different focus area, has opened 80 criminal proceedings based on their own verification.
Why do corrupt officials still feel generally safe?
- Manual verification of declarations
Guess when the parts of the register which would enable automatic verification of officials’ wealth were ready. Back in September 2016! But – alas – the NACP refused to approve them for no apparent reason.
Is it because writing applications, sending them via snail mail and waiting for a response is more “effective”? Even better – having access to only 13 registers out of 29.
Or perhaps the reason was that the register launched on September 1 disabled the possibility to meddle with the automatic modules? The President said that the program was “completely rebooted.”
- Flawed verification procedure
Over 300,000 declarations of top officials are obligatory to verify. To start every verification, a decision of Agency managers is required, who appoint the verifier at their own discretion.
Even the verified dozens of declarations are questionable. For instance, the NACP failed to react to undeclared property of the President himself when investigative journalists discovered it.
Why? You’ll be surprised, but the Agency can only check the declared items!
But wait, there’s more. There are only up to 60+30 days allocated for verifying every declaration. What if the NACP fails to obtain certain information within this period? In that case, this declaration will be considered the loveliest thing in the world no matter how much unverified stuff remains in it.
And then it will be impossible to verify this same official in the same context. This inoculation against truthfulness is so strong that not even two years of jail time for lying in the declaration can fight it.
- The NACP reigns, but does not rule
The Agency has actually approved the aforementioned procedure facing pressure from the Ministry of Justice to obtain official national registration. However, it is not the only way the NACP is limited in its activity.
As the owner of the register, the Agency is however still not its technical administrator. The administrator is state-owned enterprise Ukrainian Special Systems, managed by State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection.
If you recall, it was this very Service that almost wrecked the launch of this reform in the first place by failing to provide the certificate necessary for the system.
As the result, the NACP cannot form its own “filer profile” or create its own information search parameters. Moreover, it does not fully account for the work of the register, which many people saw failing when they were filing their declarations.
- Disregard to International Advice
Foreign experts Tilman Hoppe and Valts Kalniņš estimated that currently, less than 5% of available data are studied in the verification process. It means effective legalization of hidden violations.
In the recommendations they made, they state that corrupt officials with property of unknown origin only need to wait for the too-short limitation period to expire (2 years for an administrative violation, 1 year for a disciplinary one) as long as those contrived external limitations for detailed verification by the NACP exist.
Frank Paul, team leader of the Support Group for Ukraine in the European Commission, was later surprised that a significant part of the recommendations was never used, even though it was the Agency that asked to provide them.
So what can be done?
Independent international expert review of the register could establish the technical quality of the system. It needs to be open to international experts.
The Agency also needs to gain full access to public registers and become the administrator of the system, in which all automatic declaration verification modules will finally be launched.
But real results that everyone has been waiting for can only appear when the NACP becomes independent. It means full reset of the Agency based on new rules. The draft law stipulating it, approved by the Council of Europe, has been collecting dust in the parliament for almost a year and a half.
The NACP and the Ministry of Justice also need to fix the mechanism of the so-called “full verification” to make electronic declaration truly effective cure for corruption, not another pseudo-med for Europeans to make them give us money.
The authorities have been feeding us promises all this time, but urgent creation of an effective mechanism for e-declarations verification was already directly mentioned by the EU at the recent summit as a condition for visa-free travel.
Perhaps, the threat of losing it can help us stay optimistic and take on the challenge?
Oleksandr Kalitenko, Policy Analysis Expert, Transparency International Ukraine
For Ukrainska Pravda
