The Accounting Chamber has completed an audit on the reform of the remuneration system in public administration. The Head of the Center for Fiscal Policy Research, Viktor Maziarchuk, was officially involved in the audit team’s work.
According to the audit findings, despite a 43% increase in the average monthly salary and the introduction of a new job classification system, the civil service pay reform has not achieved its main objective – creating a transparent and fair remuneration system. Among the reasons cited were weak coordination, lack of unified rules, and insufficient planning.

Viktor Maziarchuk noted that the Center’s participation in the audit was a continuation of the dialogue with the Accounting Chamber that began more than a year ago. “During one of the regular Coffee Talks meetings between Accounting Chamber member Kyrylo Klymenko and representatives of think tanks, we discussed how the expert community could assist in preparing audits. When the topic of civil service reform came up, we agreed to participate – because this is essentially a story about data,” he said.

The Center’s team took on the technical part of the work – processing a massive dataset on civil servants’ salaries.

“The Accounting Chamber collected data from key spending units. We received thousands of files with different structures, column names, and formatting errors, and turned this chaos into a single large dataset with over 3.3 million records on more than 130,000 civil servants,” Maziarchuk explained. “We then worked with the audit team on sampling, visualizations, and calculations. It was an extensive technical effort – without it, the analysis of the reform would have been impossible.”

As part of the audit, the team also systematized information from the National Agency of Ukraine on Civil Service regarding job classifications. “Members of the audit group received hundreds of Excel sheets with classification data – and together we transformed them into a unified database, systematically collecting information for 2023–2024 for the first time,” the Center’s head added.

Photo: Accounting Chamber of Ukraine.