In practice, unfortunately, after three months of
monitoring, Transparency International Ukraine was unable to find a
single web portal that met even a minimal level of transparency.
Why is this important? Because public
spending accounts for almost half of Ukraine’s gross domestic product
(http://www.heritage.org/index/country/ukraine)
and the national tax burden is equivalent to almost forty percent of
total domestic income – which means Ukrainians contribute a larger
share of their national wealth to their government than
high-functioning welfare states like Canada, Australia, and Japan. So
how can the average citizen, or even a more knowledgeable journalist
or academic, track where the money is going?
To find out, we established a set of
criteria that emphasized both how much information is available on
each web portal as well as how easy it is to navigate. There were
twenty-eight criteria in total, subdivided into six basic
categories:
1. Procurement
planning information
2. Public
notification of the procurement process
3. Selection of
suppliers
4. The flow of the
procurement process
5. Finalization of
the deal
6. Ease of
navigation
Along with a team
of volunteers, we spent three months applying these criteria to the
website of every ministry, regional state administration, and central
executive authority, the municipal government of the twenty-five
‘most livable’ cities in Ukraine, and the twenty-six state-run
enterprises most active in public procurement.
The result: out of
a total of 111 possible points, the leader was Energoatom,
the state nuclear power monopoly, with 22 points, followed by the
city councils of Rivne and Brovary (21 points) and Kyiv and
Sevastopol (19 points). Rounding out the top 10 were the State Border
Guard Service of Ukraine, Ivano-Frankivsk City Council, Ministry of
Environment and Mineral Resources of Ukraine, Mukachevo City Council,
and Mikolayiv Regional State Administration. On the other end of the
spectrum was a two-point three-way tie for last place between the
city councils of Truskavets (Lviv Region) and Buchansky (Kyiv Region)
and the Crimea Council of Ministers.
We had hoped to
see at least some web portals score over fifty points, and the
ratings would be even lower if the web portals were evaluated solely
for content and not usability. When Ukrainians are able to piece
together how public money is being spent, the results are usually not
pretty. For example, Ukrainian
Week reported on the state of public procurement late last year:
“The State
Administration of Affairs purchases fruit and vegetables at Hr 600
($75) per kilo. Kharkiv authorities put up benches in the city’s
metro station that cost the price of a Ukrainian-made car, while
nuclear power stations order Lexus cars as ‘a key to nuclear safety,’
let alone equipment which is overpriced by 300-500 percent, or
consulting services and software worth Hr 10-25 million that will
never be used in any way.”
There’s little
reason to believe the situation has changed. For example, the team of
journalists behind Nashi Groshi
website (“Our Money”) recently found one Hr 181,000
($22,270) tender
for snow removal from the courtyards for a handful of presidential
administration buildings and that the annual transportation cost
of members of the Supreme
Administrative Court to work is Hr 2.2 million ($270,685).
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Transparency International’s full report (in Ukrainian) is available here.
Oleksii Khmara is President of Transparency International Ukraine.
