Cabinet takes latest steps to fight corruption in construction, courts

Ukraine’s cabinet approved on May 28 a resolution to
launch the functioning of the State City Planning Inspection, which is one of
three bodies created to replace the State Architectural-Building Inspection,
Communities Development Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov said in a statement.
President Zelensky announced on March 13 the liquidation of the 
architectural-building inspection because of corruption. “During its years,
officials built skyscrapers in various schemes and backroom agreements. The biggest
jackpot was the issuance of building permits in city planning. We began to ruin
this in December. The e-office for builders was launched. But most painful
remain abuses in building large sites,” he said at the time, as reported by the
epravda.com.ua news site.

The government is currently expanding the use of
software and digitalization to reduce corruption in Ukraine’s courts, Justice
Minister Denys Maliuska said in an interview published on May 27 at the mind.ua
news site. “There aren’t any other options besides automating the process of
fulfilling court rulings or other documents. 90% of the actions being performed
by people currently is supposed to be performed by software. This is realistic
and requires the improvement of databases, registers, their interaction and the
writing of algorithms. Regarding actions that take up the lion’s share of time
of state officials and generate maximum corruption – processing documents,
performing arrests, removing funds from accounts – these are functions of software,”
he said.

Maliuska added, “There are many illegal judicial
rulings that we contested and overturned. That’s why we believe the system’s
corruption significantly declined. It will stop being fully corrupt when
computer algorithms will work instead of people. And that is confirmed by the
successful reforms of the last five years, during which software took over a
significant portion of human functions.”

Maliuska said he was able to raise his monthly salary
to UAH 61,000 (USD 2,268). In October, he complained to the pravda.com.ua news
site that his monthly salary was about UAH 17,000 (USD 632). He also said he
needs UAH 80,000 (USD 2,968) to continue working in his post. He said he
currently receives about UAH 37,000 a month (USD 1,376) owing to quarantine
restrictions for high-ranking officials.

Prime Minister Shmyhal told the May 27 annual cabinet
meeting that among his goals is Ukraine joining the Top 30 countries in the
Ease of Doing Business rankings produced annually by the World Bank. This will
be accomplished by reducing the tax burden for SMEs, and a “regulatory
guillotine” that cuts red tape, which has already simplified the process of
filing taxes monthly for individual entrepreneurs, he said. Shmyhal’s
predecessor, Oleksiy Honcharuk, announced the goal of joining the world’s Top
10 of doing business in the next three years.

Zenon Zawada: Anti-corruption efforts are progressing in Ukraine, but at a slow
pace. Certainly, ministers and high-ranking officials will need to earn middle-class
wages (by Western standards) to take their work seriously (and to be taken
seriously). Needless to say, Ukraine isn’t yet close to joining the world’s Top
30 in ease of doing business in the nearest future, as hoped by Shmyhal.