With nearly 1 million Ukrainian officials required to report their income and assets, this updated online course, developed by the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) with UNDP’s support, is to help understand the nuts and bolts of filling in a disclosure form and leverage the power of the newly introduced e-declaration system that has already marked a year anniversary.

In 2016, Ukraine transitioned from paper-and-ink asset disclosure forms to the electronic declaration register, making public officials’ gains transparent to the public and providing the means to gauge officials’ integrity and detect illicit enrichment. UNDP lent a helping hand to NACP in developing a necessary software for the system, which is now fully owned by the Agency.

Since the launch of this publicly accessible online database, a large pool of civil servants working at central and local governments are now obliged to disclose a wide array of their earnings and property.

“The big thing to note is that a range of subjects to asset declaration and objects to be declared in Ukraine is one of the widest in the world,” UNDP Governance Analyst Igor Gutsulyak said. “Anyone can scrutinize the information about possessions owned by officials and their immediate family to check whether public representatives are living lavishly beyond their normal means.”

To help declarants understand the depth and breadth of the system, the course, available on the Prometheus platform, is intended to teach public officials about the new asset disclosure requirements and equip them with necessary knowledge to make effective decisions.

The online course sheds light on who should submit e-declarations, what and how to declare. It contains detailed information on each section of the disclosure form, so it is convenient to use it as an interactive instruction while filing an e-declaration. If necessary, a user can choose the section that he/she needs and skip others.

The course offers an overview of the system, instructions on how to register in the database, guidelines on how to fill in each of the 16 sections of the e-declaration form, detailed explanations on how to handle the change of a digital signature and e-mail or other technical issues, and links to open state registers containing most of the information required to complete the e-declaration form.

Explaining how to use such an innovative digital tool as the e-declaration system, the course provides a strong support to both officials who are required to declare their assets and anti-corruption watchdogs ensuring an effective corruption prevention.  

The initiative is supported under the Enhanced Public Sector Transparency and Integrity Project, implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ukraine and financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark (2015-2018).