Problem

The Law of Ukraine On Prevention of Corruption contains a list of categories of positions and specific characteristics that determine the range of declarants. This is a fairly broad range of persons who must submit a declaration of a person authorized to carry out the functions of state or local self-government.
The results of analysis of the changes made to the list of declarants show that they were only partly caused by legislative amendments, creation or liquidation of government agencies, or other objective reasons. However, a significant portion of them resulted from a poorly justified decision of the legislator about a significant level of corruption risks inherent in a particular position or function.
Numerous appeals to the National Agency in which applicants ask for clarification on whether they have status as declarants also speak to the ambiguity of the state policy in this field as well as the vagueness of regulatory wording.
The main reason for this situation is that the legislator did not study the substance of the relevant legal relations in depth and did not evaluate them for corruption risks. As a result, the legislator not only uses ambiguous wording when determining the list of declarants, which leads to legal uncertainty and contradictory court practice, but also includes in the list of declarants those whose official duties almost completely rule out any corruption risks.
At the same time, there are several obvious and acute problems that need to be addressed immediately. In particular, given the decentralization reform and the resulting significant increase in the budgets of municipal enterprises, the corruption appeal of positions at private law legal entities in which a municipal shareholding exceeds 50 percent has increased significantly. This necessitates the extension of financial control measures to such entities.
Another widely recognized problem is the artificial division by the legislator of categories that are in fact substantially identical: "positions with a high level of corruption risks" and "position with an elevated level of corruption risks", as well as "persons occupying a position of authority" and "persons occupying a position of particularly high authority". The principle of legal certainty and lawmaking techniques clearly require that these categories be combined.