The issue of restricting access to the rules of logical and arithmetic control for electronic declarations

In 2024, more than 1.2 million electronic declarations were filed to the Unified State Register. Meanwhile, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) in 2024 completed the full audit of only 715 declarations. Given the NACP’s limited resources to conduct full audits, the methodology under which declarations are selected for such audit becomes a key issue. Each submitted declaration automatically undergoes a computerized risk assessment and receives its own risk rating. The risk rating of declarations is assessed by using special rules of logical and arithmetic control (LAC) developed by the NACP. In 2018-2020, these LAC rules were publicly available, but since 2021 the NACP has classified the LAC rules as proprietary information and stopped publishing them. The current Procedure of 2024 explicitly prohibits the NACP from publishing the content of the LAC rules. However, the NACP’s denial of access to information on the LAC rules appears to be insufficiently justified. Such a restriction of access to information does not meet the criteria of the “three-part test” which is established in clause 1 of part 2 of Article 6 of the Law of Ukraine “On Access to Public Information” and construed in legal positions of cassation courts. Moreover, information on the LAC rules constitutes public interest. For many years, specialized NGOs and independent international experts have been advocating for the open publication of the LAC rules. Since access to the LAC rules is closed, the civil society and anti-corruption experts are unable to review their content and identify possible shortcomings. The National Agency is advised to revise its policy of restricting access to the LAC rules as well as to set out subparagraph 2 of clause 3 of the Procedure for Conducting Logical and Arithmetic Control of Declarations of Persons Authorized to Perform State or Local Government Functions (Order of the NACP of 21.06.2024 No. 161/24) in a new edition: “The rules of logical and arithmetic control for risk assessment of the declaration shall be established by the decision of the National Agency, included in the program code of the Register and published on the official website of the National Agency”. After that, the National Agency is recommended to approve the LAC rules as a regulatory legal act in the form of a decision of the NACP, conduct the state registration of this decision with the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine and make it available to the public.