Analysis of the Roadmap for Strengthening Public Procurement Oversight for 2025–2027

In December 2025, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved the Roadmap for Strengthening Public Procurement Oversight and the action plan for its implementation for 2025–2027 (the Roadmap). The government intends this document to serve as a framework for improving procurement control, with an emphasis on approximation to European Union standards.

The effectiveness of public procurement control has for several years remained a focus of the European Commission’s assessment of Ukraine in the EU accession process. The 2023 and 2024 enlargement reports assessed procurement control in Ukraine as weak and largely ineffective, and the 2025 report as having limited effectiveness. 

One of the Commission’s key recommendations in 2024 was precisely to draw up a roadmap for enhancing public procurement control by the State Audit Service of Ukraine, in line with the Ukraine Facility Plan. So the adoption of this document is not only an internal management step but also part of Ukraine’s broader commitment under its European integration agenda.

Let us look at which steps for strengthening public procurement control the government has made a priority, whether they address the real problems, and whether they can make control in this area more effective.

Summary

The adoption of the Roadmap for Strengthening Public Procurement Oversight for 2025–2027 is a positive and important step. Many of its measures fully or partly coincide with TI Ukraine’s recommendations on making control in this area more effective.

The Roadmap’s key measures include:

• improving procurement monitoring, in particular by introducing a mechanism for suspending a procurement while monitoring is underway, updating the classification of violations by significance, and defining proportionate ways of remedying them;
• shortening the judicial appeal procedure for the State Audit Service’s monitoring conclusions;
• optimizing the time between the triggering of automatic risk indicators and the actual start of procurement monitoring; 
• improving the mechanism of liability for procurement violations, in particular by updating Article 164-14 of the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses to reflect the updated procurement methods and the significance of violations, and by ensuring access to the personal data of those who committed such violations;
• digitalizing procurement monitoring in the e-Auditor system.

Some Roadmap measures, however, need their content clarified and a careful approach to implementation:

• the effectiveness of the suspension mechanism will depend on the model chosen, in particular on the procurement stages and the violations to which it will apply;
• enshrining the regulation of monitoring in legislation on state financial control does not clearly answer which aspects should be regulated by law and which by secondary legislation;
• the proposed changes to the procurement inspection mechanism give no clear idea of how it will work in practice, and the transparency of inspections receives too little attention;
• new approaches to selecting procurements for control based on identifying bidders that pose financial and/or other risks may create conditions for excessive discretion and need to be carefully worked through to prevent abuse.

Overall, the Roadmap sets the right direction for reforming public procurement control. Yet its real impact will depend not on the number of measures implemented but on whether the control mechanisms are improved in substance and made more preventive, risk-based, proportionate, and transparent.

Procurement monitoring

A large share of the Roadmap’s measures concerns improving procurement monitoring. The first is to establish the procedure for procurement monitoring in the legal regulations governing the State Audit Service’s activities. 

Currently, monitoring is regulated by Article 8 of the Law of Ukraine on Public Procurement. According to the Roadmap, this creates an imbalance in the legal system, since a state financial control instrument is regulated by the sectoral procurement law rather than by the main law governing the state financial control body.

The key question, however, is not so much where in legislation the monitoring mechanism is set out as how effective it is in practice. Moving the relevant provisions to other legal regulations does not in itself guarantee the quality of control. The priority should be to improve the monitoring instrument in substance, in particular by implementing other Roadmap measures.

This is why Draft Law No. 11520 left Article 8 of the Law on Public Procurement virtually unrevised: monitoring was deliberately postponed to the next legislative iteration as an issue requiring separate, comprehensive work. What is needed is not targeted but systemic changes, which should, among other things, strengthen the preventive function of monitoring, differentiate violations by significance, provide mechanisms for remedying violations, and guarantee compliance with conclusions.

If the Roadmap does envisage enshrining the regulation of monitoring in the Law on the Basic Principles of State Financial Control in Ukraine, the question will arise of how to separate the provisions that must be set at the level of law from those that can be detailed in secondary legislation. The chosen approach will largely determine whether monitoring stays in its current form or undergoes the necessary substantive changes, how predictable the procedure will be for contracting authorities, and how much room the State Audit Service will have to change its approaches to conducting it.

One shortcoming of the procurement monitoring mechanism is that a contracting authority can continue the procurement procedure, effectively ignoring both the monitoring and its results. A procurement can thus move to the next stage, including contract conclusion, before monitoring is completed, creating a risk that the violations found can no longer be remedied in a timely and effective manner. So the mechanism the Roadmap envisages for suspending a procurement during monitoring may help make preventive procurement control more effective, but it needs broad discussion and agreement. 

The final assessment of this step will depend on the exact suspension mechanism introduced. It calls for a balanced approach to avoid excessive interference in the procurement process and potential abuse. TI Ukraine therefore proposes allowing a procurement procedure to be suspended upon the start of monitoring only until the contract is concluded and only where there are signs of significant violations, the list of which should be separately defined by law. An alternative is to further extend the period between determining the winner and concluding the contract so that auditors have time to conduct monitoring within it. This option is not ideal either, as it lengthens the procedure. 

The Roadmap also provides for updating the classification of violations detected through monitoring, taking into account their significance, and the obligations to remedy them. In our earlier study, we pointed to the shift in monitoring’s focus toward detecting formal violations that neither harmed the budget nor affected the competitiveness of the procurement, and to remedies disproportionate to the significance and consequences of the violations.

The solution lies in updating the list of violations of public procurement legislation and classifying them by significance, for example, using the criteria of economic harm and procurement transparency. It is also worth considering focusing monitoring primarily on the most critical violations.

The next step should be to define a list of possible remedies for each type of violation, depending on its significance. This would prevent state financial control bodies from taking divergent approaches to setting obligations in monitoring conclusions and ensure that such obligations are proportionate to the violations established.

Another Roadmap measure grants contracting authorities the right to unilaterally terminate procurement contracts to remedy violations stated in a monitoring conclusion. It stems from the difficulties that arise when monitoring results oblige a contracting authority to terminate a contract but the contract itself contains no such ground for termination. Here, it would be more appropriate to provide for an obligation, not a discretionary right, of the contracting authority to terminate the contract — provided that the conclusion contains such a requirement and has not been appealed, or the court has dismissed the claim. Still, an obligation to terminate a contract can be justified only in a narrow range of cases, primarily for direct contracts concluded without grounds or where significant violations are found, such as procurement from Russian companies. In general, the focus should be on monitoring taking place before the contract is concluded.

The Roadmap measures on judicial appeal of monitoring conclusions appear sound. Contracting authorities sometimes use it not only to buy time and keep performing contracts concluded with violations, but also to evade liability, since lengthy court proceedings can cause the time limits for administrative liability to expire.

The shortened judicial appeal procedure for the State Audit Service’s monitoring conclusions planned in the Roadmap could therefore ensure that such conclusions are promptly confirmed or refuted. That, in turn, would safeguard against situations where contracting authorities use litigation to avoid complying with a monitoring conclusion and continue performing the contract.

According to the State Audit Service, the relevant draft law has already been developed and is being approved by the bodies concerned.

The Roadmap’s planned review of case law on appeals against procurement monitoring conclusions deserves separate attention. This review should not be limited to cases where contracting authorities challenge the conclusions themselves. Equally important is an analysis of case law on administrative offenses under public procurement legislation (Article 164-14 of the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses), where courts assess whether a violation occurred, its nature and significance, and decide whether to impose a fine.

It is in this category of cases that a systemic problem is visible: courts often disagree with the State Audit Service’s position on whether a violation occurred or find it minor, releasing individuals from liability or limiting themselves to a verbal reprimand. As a result, much of the State Audit Service’s work produces no real legal consequences.

Updating risk indicators

The key tool of the risk-based approach to selecting procurements for monitoring is the automatic risk indicators on Prozorro — metrics that the system records automatically and that point to procurements with a higher probability of violations. The list comprises 13 risk indicators, differentiated by risk level and aimed at detecting specific signs of violations, except for the last one, which can cover any signs and allows other indicators to be added to the system.

According to the State Audit Service’s 2025 report, of the 10,828 monitoring cases conducted during the reporting period, 2,913 (26.9%) were based on automatic risk indicator data.

According to monthly statistics from the BI Prozorro analytics module, the share of monitoring cases the State Audit Service launched on the basis of risk indicators gradually fell from 61.35% in December 2024 to 15–20%. In some months, auditors used this ground more often, notably in almost 35% of cases in December 2025. This is probably also because more indicators are triggered at the end of the year. But the absence of a steady trend toward wider use of this ground shows that its potential is not yet fully tapped.

Currently, the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine sets the methodology for determining automatic risk indicators, the procedure for applying them, and their list. The Roadmap, however, notes several challenges that state auditors face with this mechanism:

• the difficulty of promptly updating risk indicators because of the lengthy procedure;
• unscrupulous contracting authorities evading state financial control by artificially avoiding the triggering of risk indicators — possible because the indicators are public, so contracting authorities know their algorithms.

Both points are somewhat debatable, since the 13th indicator on the list currently allows any signs of violations to be used as an indicator, and hence indicators to be updated promptly without amending regulations. And the openness of risk indicators should have a preventive effect and limit unnecessary discretion. If some contracting authorities do manage to commit violations while avoiding the risk indicators designed to detect them, the indicator’s content may need revisiting and its algorithm refining. 

The Roadmap provides for optimizing approaches to a flexible mechanism for updating risk indicators, in particular by revising the procedure for approving automatic risk indicators and giving the State Audit Service the right to develop the relevant algorithms on its own. In this context, the planned optimization of the time between the triggering of automatic risk indicators and the actual start of procurement monitoring also looks positive, as delays at this stage can make information outdated and reduce the effectiveness of response measures and the overall preventive effect of the procurement monitoring system.

According to the State Audit Service, these changes have already been partly implemented: late last year, the Methodological Recommendations on State Financial Control in Public Procurement were amended, which, among other things, improved the monitoring procedure and shortened the time between the triggering of automatic risk indicators and the actual start of procurement monitoring.

Concerns arise, however, over the new approaches to selecting procurements for control that take into account the identification of bidders posing financial and/or other risks. This wording gives the impression that the very participation of certain entities in a procurement will be treated as a risk factor. Such an approach looks questionable, as it may pave the way for de facto “blacklists” of bidders. The measure therefore needs clarification to avoid excessive discretion and potential abuse.

Note that the risk-based approach to selecting procurements for monitoring is not limited to risk indicators. It should account for the potential negative consequences of violating procurement legislation, whose magnitude depends, among other things, on the value of the procurement item. Yet in 2025, more than a quarter of the monitoring cases launched by state financial control bodies on their own initiative concerned procurements with an estimated value below UAH 1 million. Given limited time and staff, and the fact that among competitive and direct above-threshold procurements in 2025 the State Audit Service’s monitoring covered less than 2% of lots by number and 15.8% by value, this allocation of resources looks unjustified. 

The resources spent on analyzing such procurements could be used more effectively to detect significant violations that can still be remedied and that affect the efficiency of public spending on the largest scale. Yet the Roadmap’s measures do not include mandatory monitoring for certain categories of procurement, such as those with high-value procurement items.

Procurement inspections 

Besides monitoring, the Roadmap provides for improving another control measure — procurement inspections.This involves updating terminology, aligning procurement inspection procedures with the new approaches to financial inspections, and setting clear procedures, time limits, rights, and obligations in the inspection process. The measure is worded rather generally and gives no clear idea of what the updated mechanism will look like in practice. 

The problem of ensuring inevitable liability for violations found through such inspections is further complicated by their non-public nature. Information on procurement inspections is not published, which limits the transparency of this control measure. 

When the State Audit Service finds signs of criminal offenses during procurement inspections, the materials are handed over to law enforcement agencies. Although some of these measures are carried out not within a criminal proceeding but before it, they may become entirely non-public once the materials are handed over. By contrast, procurement monitoring results remain open in the Prozorro system even when later used in pre-trial investigations.

The fact that similar control measures in some EU countries are not public should not in itself be an argument against greater transparency of inspections in Ukraine. Ukraine’s system of financial control in procurement already has its own instruments that do not exist in this form in other countries, such as procurement monitoring. So approaches to the publicity of inspections should be defined with the Ukrainian context and the practical problems of conducting them in mind. In particular, greater transparency can serve as an extra safeguard where auditors are denied access to an inspection, refused the necessary information, or otherwise obstructed.

The opacity of procurement inspections can lead to their unjustified suspension or delay and prevents analysts and the public from examining them. In implementing this area, the government and the State Audit Service should therefore pay particular attention to making procurement inspections more transparent — at least in the part that poses no risk to pre-trial investigation but ensures a proper level of public scrutiny and the ability to assess this instrument’s effectiveness.

Liability for public procurement violations

To strengthen liability for public procurement violations, the Roadmap provides for amending Article 164-14, Violation of Procurement Legislation, of the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses after the adoption of Draft Law No. 11520, to reflect the procurement methods and the significance of the violation and to introduce liability for failure to comply with the State Audit Service’s requirements.

In practice, the mechanism of liability under this article does not ensure that liability is inevitable — both because the time limits for imposing administrative penalties are too short and because its list of administrative offenses in procurement is outdated. Moreover, the problem may worsen considerably once the new Law of Ukraine on Public Procurement enters into force, as it substantially updates procurement methods and introduces new procedures not covered by the existing offense definitions.

Another part of the problem that hampered administrative liability in previous years was the State Audit Service’s lack of full access to the personal data of those who committed an administrative offense. Because of gaps in legislation, contracting authorities could avoid giving the body the information needed to draw up an administrative offense report, hear the case in court, or issue a decision imposing liability.

In February last year, parliament adopted Law No. 4240-IX, which was meant to strengthen liability and give the State Audit Service access to the personal data of those against whom an administrative offense report is drawn up. It is to implement this law that the Roadmap provides for access to the personal data of procurement violators through the State Audit Service’s access to information from the Unified State Demographic Register. The State Audit Service can already obtain such data for drawing up reports based on procurement monitoring results upon request to the State Migration Service. It is also working to automate the data transfer.

According to the State Audit Service, it has concluded an agreement with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the State Migration Service on access to the Unified State Demographic Register and improved the procedures by which auditors obtain the personal data of those who committed procurement violations, as required by Law of Ukraine No. 4240-IX.

Meeting Ukraine Facility requirements and testing internal control systems

One of the Roadmap’s measures for improving the mechanisms of control over compliance with procurement legislation is meeting the requirements of the Framework Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union on the implementation of the Ukraine Facility. 

State financial control over the implementation of the Ukraine Facility is entrusted to the State Audit Service, and control over the use of funds under the program is largely focused on public procurement. The Ukraine Facility also sets a number of additional requirements, compliance with which auditors will check during procurement monitoring, in particular whether bidders are subject to EU sanctions and whether the bidders themselves or their goods originate from countries the European Commission recognizes as eligible. This probably explains the need, set out in the Roadmap, to improve methodological approaches to procurement control as part of meeting the Framework Agreement’s requirements. 

According to the State Audit Service, to implement the Framework Agreement, late last year it issued a number of orders updating the methodological recommendations on procurement inspections, state financial audits, and monitoring of procurement procedures.

Another task aimed at improving the mechanisms of control over compliance with procurement legislation under the Roadmap is introducing testing of contracting authorities’ internal control systems for the procurement process. The expected results include:

• an assessment of how effectively the contracting authority’s internal control system for the procurement process functions;
• identification of potentially non-transparent procedures in the procurement process or an insufficient level of internal accountability;
• an assessment of the effectiveness of procurement planning, monitoring of procurement contract performance, and correction of deficiencies identified in procurement;
• greater integrity and transparency, in particular as a result of analyzing the contracting authority’s internal control system;
• greater accountability of contracting authorities, in particular through external control.

Effective internal control can certainly become an additional tool for preventing violations and abuse in procurement. But the Roadmap’s text does not make entirely clear what the content and specifics of testing internal control systems are, since checking and analyzing how such systems function is already part of the state financial audit conducted by the State Audit Service.

According to the State Audit Service, as part of updating the methodological recommendations on procurement inspections, it introduced checklists for testing contracting authorities’ internal control systems in the procurement process, drawing on relevant international experience.

Digitalization of control 

The Roadmap contains at least two measures to expand the digitalization of control over compliance with procurement legislation.

The first concerns digitalizing procurement monitoring in the integrated automated system e-Auditor. The idea is to move monitoring procedures into a single digital environment to automate routine actions, introduce consistent standards and decision-making algorithms for monitoring, make officials’ actions more transparent, reduce operational risks, and strengthen the analytical component of this instrument. This is intended to improve the quality of control and streamline the monitoring process.

According to the State Audit Service, to make procurement monitoring in the e-Auditor system technically possible, a public procurement analytical workspace, functionality for processing requests and complaints, and a module for working with sanctioned entities have been put into pilot operation. 

Yet the potential benefit of this measure will largely depend on whether digitalization becomes a tool for substantive improvement rather than a mere technical transfer of existing processes to a new digital environment. In other words, e-Auditor can be a useful tool for making control more effective, but only if its rollout is accompanied by a revision of the very approaches to procurement monitoring.

The Roadmap has not passed over the trend of using artificial intelligence either: by June of this year, the State Audit Service planned to develop a solution for applying generative artificial intelligence models, or language models, to process large volumes of data when addressing matters of control over compliance with procurement legislation.

Although the wording of this measure’s performance indicator (“when addressing matters of control”) gives no clear idea of the stage of control at which artificial intelligence may be applied, the Roadmap highlights the problem of the growing volume of information to be processed precisely during control measures.

Artificial intelligence could speed up the initial analysis of information and partly ease auditors’ workload when processing large volumes of it. But such a tool must not be used to fully automate control or to establish violations without proper verification by officials. The key is therefore to clearly define the role of language models solely as auxiliary analytical tools and to introduce rules for their use, in particular on mandatory verification of results and regular assessment of the models’ quality and accuracy.

As with the digitalization of procurement monitoring, though, this measure seems premature given the need to first improve the existing procurement control mechanisms, which the Roadmap itself provides for. It is important that the introduction of new technological solutions does not divert attention and resources from the main goals the Roadmap pursues. 

Professional development and communication

The last block of Roadmap measures is devoted to introducing best international practices and tools for control over compliance with procurement legislation, as well as to professional development and the State Audit Service’s openness in communication and transparency. In particular, it provides for experience exchange and training for those responsible for such control, a communication campaign to build a positive image of the State Audit Service, and greater publicity and transparency of state financial control measures. To accomplish the last task, the plan is, among other things, to introduce an interactive information and analytical tool that will present data on completed control measures on the State Audit Service’s website. 

It is essential that data publication under this measure cover not only procurement monitoring results but also other forms of control, information about which is currently far less accessible.

The wording of the measure and of its performance indicator is not fully consistent, though. While the measure’s description refers specifically to an interactive information and analytical tool, the performance indicator comes down to posting data on the State Audit Service’s website and the Unified State Open Data Web Portal. These approaches are not identical: publishing datasets or information on a website does not amount to creating a full-fledged interactive tool. 

So when implementing this measure, it is important not to stop at formally meeting the indicator by publishing data but to create a truly convenient, structured, and integrated digital solution that makes it possible to track planned control measures, the procurements or budget programs they cover, contracting authorities, documents, and results. This could raise the transparency of control, strengthen the impact of civic monitoring, and create additional safeguards against abuse.

Conclusion

Overall, the adoption of the Roadmap for Strengthening Public Procurement Oversight for 2025–2027 is a positive and important step. The document will serve as a reference point for further improving procurement control, which is also in line with Ukraine’s European integration commitments. Moreover, many of its measures fully or partly coincide with TI Ukraine’s recommendations on making control in this area more effective, which indicates the right direction.

The Roadmap contains a number of measures that can genuinely make control more effective, for example:

• updating the classification of violations detected through procurement monitoring to reflect their significance and defining ways of remedying them;
• introducing a shortened judicial appeal procedure for the State Audit Service’s conclusions;
• optimizing approaches to a flexible (continuous) mechanism for updating the list of automatic risk indicators;
• ensuring access to the personal data of those who committed procurement violations;
• increasing the publicity and transparency of state financial control measures.

Some Roadmap measures, however, appear secondary or need clarification during implementation. These include enshrining the regulation of monitoring in legislation on state financial control without a clear rationale for which aspects should be regulated by law and which by secondary legislation; using artificial intelligence without clearly defined limits and rules of application; introducing new approaches to selecting procurements for control based on identifying bidders “that pose financial and/or other risks”; and testing contracting authorities’ internal control systems.

We believe that in implementing the Roadmap, the focus must stay on the key task: improving the forms of control in substance, ensuring their preventive function, and increasing transparency, particularly of procurement inspections. Unless these pressing problems are solved, ambitious digital or communication solutions will not genuinely strengthen procurement control.

TI Ukraine supports the implementation of the Roadmap as a necessary framework document for strengthening public procurement control and is ready to provide expert support in implementing its measures to make procurement control more effective.

This material was made possible with the support of the MATRA program of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine. Responsibility for the content lies with the author and does not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy.