This Thursday the Civic Expert Council under the Parliamentary Committee on Combatting Corruption and Organized Crime summed up its work on conducting civic expert assessment of draft laws, which were proposed to be put up for a vote during the third parliamentary session of Verkhovna Rada's seventh convocation.

 

The Civic Expert Council, established in March 2013, has 28 members and is called to help the Committee in implementing its functions: initiating anticorruption regulatory initiatives, commissioning research, preparing hearings, round tables and other activities aimed at debating anticorruption policies. The Council comprises representatives of civil society organizations and groups, which most actively partake in corruption prevention initiatives, alongside independent civic experts.

 

The work of the Council was further catalyzed after the May 2013 amendments to the specialized law "On Preventing and Countering Corruption" took action. Some highlights of amendmanets adopted

 

Such alternations allowed the civil society to conduct expert assessments of draft regulations crafted by the members of parliament for possible corruption loopholes. Before the amendments were introduced, only draft laws originating with the executive branch were open for such assessment. Stimulated by change, the Expert Council decided to commence analysis of draft laws that would be submitted for possible consideration of the third parliamentary session. The methodology previously supported and tested with the assistance of UNDP in Ukraine in late 2012 – beginning of 2013 was picked as the most appropriate tool for analysis. At the request of the Parliamentary Committee, 140 draft laws were processed between August and December of 2013, and almost one third of those (27%) returned a risk-positive result.

 

Assessment results, which are made public on the Committee website, show that some of the corruption-generating factors appear much more often than the others. Thus, for instance, conflicts of laws, loopholes or wide administrative discretion instances were spotted in 103 legal norms. At the same time, imbalance of interest was found in 23 instances, excessive contacts between government agencies and business appeared in 5 clauses and on 7 occasions a government body would be entrusted with both issuing the rules and controlling oneself for adherence (thus, violating the checks and balances).

 

During expert work, specialists found both single instances of corruption-related legal norms and cases of what could be termed a "nation-wide corruption scheme". Draft law 2302(a), for instance, proposed to regulate the procedure of issuing permits for performing price evaluations for real-estate. The permit-issuing authority would, according to the law, receive excessively wide and unclear powers in this regard.

 

 

At the same time, the draft state budget for 2014 and proposed relevant amendments turned out to be the most "versatile" in terms of corruption-generating factors.

 

As Viktor Chumak, Head of the Parliamentary Committee on Combatting Corruption and Organized Crime noted, "the closed-off manner, which characterized adoption of the state budget, has already created extensive opportunities for dragging corrupt schemes through parliament. Thus, for instance, the adopted Law on State Budget vests the Cabinet of Ministers with unclear, but rather wide authority as to regulating state-backed credits". The MP believes that this may open avenues for favouritism aimed at commercial projects beneficial to a narrow circle of higher-up officials and parliamentarians, while shifting the weight of responsibility onto all taxpayers of Ukraine.

A similar situation may be observed with regards to the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine regarding the list of loans which are used to fill in the State Budget's Special Fund. Systemic problems were also unearthed in connection to unproportional allocation of subsidies to local budgets for socio-economic development of certain regions within the framework of the State Fund for Regional Development. The majority of such costs (up to 93% according to experts' estimates) are channelled to the single-member constituencies of parliamentarians from the ruling party and independent MPs.

 

 

As Viktor Taran, Head of the Centre for Political Studies and Analysis and Co-Chair of the Civic Expert Council notes, such tendencies may testify to "intransparent cost allocation and use of funds to strengthen the loyalties of voters". Apart from that, the budget contains risks regarding cancellation of competitive bidding for some types of state procurement by automatically prolonging the agreements, signed in 2013.

 

 

While the presence of corruption risks does not automatically translate into criminal activities, such loopholes and conflicts create an enabling environment for all the dire consequences, which characterize systemic corruption at all levels: syphoning of public funds through intransparent procurement schemes, ultimate loss of trust towards state institutions and inability to protect one's rights in a legitimate manner. Correction of such mistakes should take place consistently through review of laws in their first reading.

 

 

The Civic Expert Council continues to conduct assessments of corruption risks and "polishing" the mechanisms and tools used throughout the process of civic anticorruption expert assessment. Amongst some of the most important issues currently on the agenda is the adoption of mechanisms for obligatory consideration of the expert assessment results before the final adoption of the regulation into action. At the same time, it is important to increase societal pressure in this sphere through more active cooperation between the journalist community and the civil society to bring about more effective awareness-raising for the media audience regarding risks that exist when certain regulatory instruments are put to action.