The Fiscal Policy Research Center presented its projects to the leadership of the OECD Ukraine Office, highlighting solutions that could serve as benchmarks for monitoring the use of public funds.
During the meeting, the Center’s team demonstrated how they work with open data — including incomplete and fragmented datasets — transforming them into BI tools, building AI models on top of this data, and developing projects focused on verifying recovery expenditures.
“We like to say that we bring order to chaos. Ukraine has a vast amount of open data, but it requires the right expertise to work with it effectively,” said Viktor Maziarchuk, Head of the Center.
He also spoke about cooperation with the Ministry for Communities and Territories Development, at whose request the team developed a BI tool to monitor more than 600 projects implemented with the support of international financial institutions (IFIs). The data is already public and will soon be available on the Ministry’s website.
Another example is the school canteen modernization project initiated by the First Lady with the support of EUACI. Within this initiative, the Center’s experts built a system that updates data on a daily basis: procurement and payment data are automatically uploaded overnight, and updated information is available to decision-makers by the next morning.
Viktor Maziarchuk also highlighted the “Cost of War” project — a large-scale database on Ukraine’s recovery that covers expenditures from the state budget, local budgets, and international assistance.
“We initiated the idea of bringing together and verifying all data on war-related expenditures in one place. We apply a unified approach to everything. This is our key advantage compared to others, including state resources. In fact, the Center is setting standards for how to work with public recovery data in Ukraine,” he explained.
At the same time, he pointed out to OECD experts the problematic practice of some government institutions not publishing expenditure data on the public spending portal E-data.
“It is understandable when data related to security, defense, or critical infrastructure is not disclosed. But why, for example, are payments for salaries or procurement hidden in the Ministry of Economy or the Ministry of Justice? Because one program is classified as critical infrastructure, everything gets closed off automatically,” Maziarchuk noted.
Michał Falencki, Head of the OECD Office in Ukraine, raised the issue of how to obtain reliable, consolidated information on expenditures, given that data sources are often fragmented. In response, the Center’s analysts demonstrated how their model for collecting, verifying, and updating data works.
Anna Bilous, an analyst at the OECD Directorate, emphasized that the Center is effectively creating a “data infrastructure” for working with public finance data in Ukraine.