First Steps of New NACP Head Viktor Pavlushchyk: What Were They?

Five months ago, Viktor Pavlushchyk won the NACP competition, and a day later, the government appointed him to the post of Head of the National Agency. Of course, we at Transparency International Ukraine have been closely following his actions in his new position all this time.

Let me note right away that we planned to publish this material about six months after the appointment of Viktor Pavlushchyk. However, in Ukraine, time flies extremely fast, events happen even faster, and the new NACP Head has already attended many public events, including international ones, and given interviews in the media in recent months. Therefore, we can now see his vision of the NACP development, understand what he considers a priority, and form our own opinion on such steps without waiting for six months to pass.

What did Viktor Pavlushchyk manage to do during his five months in office? Can these steps be considered successful? Let’s try to figure it out.

Unjustified “love” for lifestyle monitoring

Judging by public communication, just as his predecessor did, Viktor Pavlushchyk is betting on strengthening the tool for monitoring the lifestyle of officials, which he covers quite enthusiastically in commentaries to journalists. This approach is a bit surprising because the mechanism of lifestyle monitoring still has a lot of deficiencies. Despite the fact that it has recently been regulated by an officially registered procedure, and not by optional methodical recommendations, the use of the tool by the National Agency still raises many questions.

Viktor Pavlushchyk does not say anything about improving the lifestyle monitoring procedure, but again and again emphasizes that the introduction and expansion of this mechanism within the activities of the NACP will become his main task, a kind of basis for the entire operation of the NACP.

For example, the difference between the application of lifestyle monitoring and the full checks of declarations is still unclear. The legal grounds for launching the procedures are quite similar; in practice, there may be confusion about which one should be started in different cases.

There are also questions about the extent to which lifestyle monitoring will allow disproportionate interference by NACP employees in the private lives of officials. Moreover, some powers of NACP employees engaged in this are quite dubious because these specialists, for example, have the right to freely enter the premises of public authorities, local self-government bodies, legal entities, etc. using their employment IDs. In our opinion, this is definitely too much, since lifestyle monitoring is a “desk check,” for which the authorized person does not need to leave their workplace. If the NACP uses this right in practice, the court could potentially find it an undue interference with privacy.

But our greatest concern is that there is still no automatic distribution of monitoring cases among NACP employees to conduct the procedure. This is fraught with the fact that specific categories of declarants or even individuals will be checked by very specific people in the National Agency, and there is already a space for abuse and political influences, isn’t there?

There are also questions to the so-called “quick” checks—an artificially created control measure by the NACP to verify the completeness of declarations. Nothing has changed here since the time of Oleksandr Novikov in office: the relevant department continues to function within the structure of the NACP. The problem with “quick” checks is that they are not aimed at finding signs of illicit enrichment, unreasonable assets, or conflict of interest at all.

As far as the new NACP practices of conducting full checks of officials’ declarations are concerned, the situation has even taken a turn for the worse. Full checks in practice turn out to be less effective than lifestyle monitoring—this is indicated in particular by the figures recently published by the Agency. The NACP noted this as an achievement, but in practice, a new risk-oriented approach to the selection and verification of declarations led to the fact that from the perspective of finding unjustified assets of officials alone, one case of lifestyle monitoring turned out to be more effective than more than 200 full checks of declarations for the first six months of the year because it found almost UAH 29 million worth of such assets, and two hundred inspections found a half—UAH 14.4 million.

It seems that such a difference in results is due to the fact that when fully checking a declaration, the NACP, in our opinion, focuses more on identifying inaccuracies in the e-declaration, for example, declared differences of several hundred hryvnias on bank accounts. Subsequently, they rely on such inaccuracies, and not on the persona of the declarant and their family members, who are the main subject in lifestyle monitoring and have to be as important within full checks.

Instead, in order to increase the number of formally verified declarations, in addition to all the already mentioned tools, the NACP, already under Pavlushchyk, erroneously introduced the concept of automated full checks, which we opposed, just as we did with “quick” checks.

The NACP now states that automated verification can cover up to 30% of all submitted declarations. It might have sense only at first glance because fewer declarations (about 0.2% of the annual number of submitted) get checked in Ukraine than we would like to. However, such artificial overestimation of verification rates through automation can lead to the fact that even those officials who “failed” lifestyle monitoring can successfully pass an automated check.

Therefore, the current NACP Head, instead of bragging about formal figures of formal checks of declarations, should focus more on the quality of such a verification. This is impossible without the proper engagement of a person, not a computer. In addition, close European countries of the region—Romania, Moldova, Slovenia, Latvia, and Poland—also check about 0.2-2% of the submitted declarations.

So far, there have been no changes in the approaches to identifying conflicts of interest and stalling in the issue of whistleblower protection.

The issue of monitoring conflicts of interest and related anti-corruption restrictions (for example, on gifts to officials) by the NACP in Ukraine remains undefined. At any rate, Viktor Pavlushchyk does not cover this problem in his public commentaries, and there is still no automatic distribution of relevant monitoring cases among the Agency’s employees, nor is there an officially registered procedure for conducting such monitoring.

That is, this issue, which was described in detail by the auditors in their report, and which was repeatedly stated by public experts, was not in the focus of the new Head of the NACP.

In his communication with journalists, Pavlushchyk also mentions the launch of the Unified Whistleblower Reporting Portal almost a year ago. But he says something strange about it, allegedly, it is necessary “… not to change the portal 10 times; it should be done once and for all.”

But we have not seen such changes, a plan, or a concept of their implementation in almost six months. This is despite the fact that the connection to the portal continues, and the number of reports received through it is constantly growing; currently there are more than 3,500 of them. Who can access these reports and how? How does the NACP plan to improve the use of this anti-corruption tool? What does “once and for all” mean?

The portal does not fully comply with best practices, primarily in terms of ease of use, anonymity, and confidentiality. We are convinced that it is impossible to delay further with the improvement of the portal, and the NACP already has a proposal for a changes roadmap—a few months ago, the public presented a list of the main problems in the field of whistleblower protection that need to be addressed.

Dubious personnel policy

During the interviews in the competition for the selection of the NACP Head, Viktor Pavlushchyk promised to properly organize competitions following the model of the NABU, stating that all such appointments should be made transparently and openly. The NACP under Korchak was known for incomprehensible transfers within the body without competitions.

However, as we can see, what was said in February can be forgotten by July. At least, we have not noticed any positive practical changes in this area in almost six months. But we have noticed unexpectedly unpleasant personnel decisions: the post of deputy was given to Serhii Hupiak.

Why are anti-corruption experts so dissatisfied? We are talking about one of the finalists of the competition for the NACP Head!

That’s because Serhii Hupiak, the ex-head of the investigative department of the SBI territorial branch in Khmelnytskyi, already raised doubts about his impartiality during the selection. For example, journalist Natalia Sedletska then spoke about Hupiak’s participation in the NABU competition as follows: “He is the head of the SBI in Vinnytsia Oblast, that is, a subordinate of Oleksii Sukhachov, and therefore it is a direct vertical of Oleh Tatarov. Back on the weekend, the Presidential Office really considered appointing Hupiak as the NABU director. International partners were against it.” 

The candidate, for his part, at an interview for the NACP Head insisted on the independence of the SBI, where he then worked, and several times quite emotionally declared his own independence; however, he remains to be taken at his word. Neither did Hupiak fully answer the questions about the origin of some of his and his family’s savings, which he was asked about both this year and a year before during the competition for the NABU director.

The media also reported that Pavlushchyk and Hupiak were classmates, which was eventually confirmed to journalists by the Head of the NACP himself. He argued the appointment of Hupiak as follows: “We simply do not have time to prepare a person from another field.”

Representatives of the NACP said that Hupiak was fully prepared for this work, as he had been among the finalists of two competitions—for the position of the NABU director in 2023 and for the position of the NACP head in 2024. However, the agency fails to see a conflict of interest in this appointment, as it has repeatedly stressed that the very fact of the work or training of persons in the past is not an unconditional circumstance that indicates its existence. The relationship of the NACP head with Serhii Hupiak, according to the Agency, is exclusively business-like.

Interestingly, the NACP’s units for the formation of integrity (in the private and public spheres), the development of the whistleblower institution, as well as the minimization of corruption risks and anti-corruption expertise will be subordinated to Hupiak. Therefore, it is already clear that there will be a lot of attention to his activities in the Agency.

But is there hope?

Of course, we would not say that everything in the work of the NACP and Pavlushchyk has failed or has been unsatisfactory.

For example, the undeniable achievement of the NACP under Pavlushchyk is that the Agency has finally transferred the groundwork in the field of sanctions policy not provided for by the legislative mandate of the NACP to the relevant Interagency Working Group.

The Head of the NACP also mentioned the need to implement the recommendations of the external independent audit provided a year ago, and has already divided the previously unified internal control and corruption prevention unit. This is a useful step as these two departments have a different nature—control and preventive. Moreover, internal control stopped checking the declarations of intelligence officers and counterintelligence officers, etc.; this function was taken over by a separate newly created unit, which is a positive step.

It is unfortunate, however, that the very procedures for checking intelligence officers remain closed contrary to audit recommendations. Therefore, it is impossible to determine their effectiveness and make sure that there are no gaps. More than a hundred other recommendations of the independent audit are still awaiting implementation.

In our opinion, the partial autofill of the draft e-declaration with information from state registers at the stage of its submission by the declarant has prospects and will significantly simplify the life of officials when filling out declarations.

However, a potentially dangerous precedent was that the updated and registered by the Ministry of Justice procedure for logical and arithmetic control (LAC) of submitting declarations began to directly stipulate that the LAC rules were not subject to publication and distribution. Even under Oleksandr Novikov’s leadership, we were very critical of the closure of the LAC, and the auditors did not find a legal justification for such actions of the Agency.

By the way, the Plan for the Implementation of External Audit Recommendations announced a year ago could not yet be found on the NACP website. We very much hope that the NACP does not plan to ignore most of the opinions of international experts on the implementation of these recommendations.

An independent audit mechanism with the possibility of dismissal of the head for inefficiency of the body was introduced into the legislation after the negative experience of the collegial NACP, whose first head was Natalia Korchak.

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Of course, five months is not enough for fundamental changes, but it is enough to determine the trajectory and establish a path. Unfortunately, some decisions of Viktor Pavlushchyk, in our opinion, already seem erroneous, although there is still room for positive changes, especially if they are introduced with a professional and truly independent team.

Therefore, the new NACP Head should dare to take all these steps. Moreover, Viktor Pavlushchyk has a roadmap—the very recommendations of the external audit.