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UNDP transfers software for the automatic verification of e-declarations to the National Agency on Corruption Prevention of Ukraine

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is continuing to support Ukraine to implement anti-corruption reforms.

 On Monday, UNDP transferred software to automatically verify e-declarations to the National Agency on Corruption Prevention in Ukraine (NACP). The software has been installed at the NACP, and allows it to identify corruption risks in the 2.76 million electronic declarations submitted by up to a million public officials since 2016. This software will significantly reduce the time needed to review e-declarations, and by linking up with other state registers it will help the NACP to instantly detect incomplete or inconsistent data.

"Adopting the e-asset declaration system two years ago has already helped to tackle corruption in Ukraine. But the new tool introduced today will automatically verify all the declarations. Before this had to be done manually, meaning verification took a long time and could contain errors. The new software will make the public sector even more transparent and accountable”, said Blerta Cela, UNDP Deputy Country Director.

“UNDP congratulates Ukraine for introducing innovative solutions to prevent corruption. This new system will raise reporting standards in the region and will be a model for other countries to follow”, Cela added.

The system has been built in collaboration with a number of state agencies and Ukrainian IT experts, and with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and the European Union Anti-Corruption Initiative (EUACI).

How does the system work?

The new software will allow the NACP to screen and filter all the declarations from officials in the unified register and find any declarations that contain indications of high corruption risk. Following this automatic verification, the NACP will perform more in-depth analysis of these declarations.

The automatic verification software can perform a full review of 100 thousand e-declarations in just 15 minutes. This automatic verification will identify those declarations that contain the highest corruption risk.

With the new software, the system will gather data from a number of other state registers (such as land, customs and tax registers) and compare it with the data in the unified register of e-declarations. Any mismatch of information will indicate that the e-declaration contains certain risks. If confirmed, this could lead to a referral of the case to the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

The risks in every e-declaration will be measured using 137 indicators, based on the verification rules set by the NACP. Each e-declaration will be scored and ranked according to these rules. The verification procedure will be applied continuously and further elaborated with the availability of new data sets.

When will the system start to operate?

Today’s transfer was possible after successful testing of the software and approval by the Quality Assurance Group made up of various governmental agencies and partners: the Government Office for Coordination of European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the “Ukrainian Special Systems” State Enterprise, the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative in Ukraine, PJSC “Institute of Informational Technologies” and the State Agency for E-Governance of Ukraine.

Over the next few weeks, the NACP will obtain all the necessary certifications for the system to become operational, and staff will be trained. It is expected that the automatic verification will be fully functional by the end of September.