The Minister of Justice Pavlo Petrenko announced that Ukraine will receive a new system of electronic declaration and monitoring officials' assets, income, and expenses. With the open register of declarations, not only the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC), but any Ukrainian citizen will be able to track online a declaration of any public servant, including the head of state or head of regional administration.

 

The system should provide for filing an e-declaration by every public servant, automatic public access to this declaration after its upload to the programme, and a special system of electronic verification of the data in the declaration.

 

This system is a real opportunity to identify individuals who illegally earned money. These individuals will be responsible for illegal enrichment under the current corruption legislation. This is a particularly serious offense, the penalty for which envisages imprisonment up to 8 years in prison. So, officials have very few options - to legalize their property and come to the police by themselves or the police will come to those public servants who received illegal income.

 

In his turn, Country Director at UNDP Ukraine Jan Thomas Hiemstra emphasized: "E-declaration systems exist in more than 100 countries all over the world, in the future we will be among them... Number of declarants in Ukraine is high, up to 1 million, so next year everybody can go and check what these people possess."

 

"Another innovation, which is not available in many countries, is that every citizen can go to the site and check assets of any official. What is important is that NAPC could have access to information and compare the declared by an official with his/her lifestyle," said the UNDP Country Director.

 

Mr. Hiemstra noted that any IT company can participate in the tender for development of the software of electronic asset declaration system of Ukraine.

 

The expert Dmytro Kotlyar said that the developed software, which will form the basis of electronic declaration system, will have no analogues in the world.