Fiscal Center contributes to the audit of the Accounting Chamber on civil service salary reform

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.

Olha Volkhina: “Transparency Is Our Most Important Strategic Asset”

A data analyst from the Center for Fiscal Policy Research participated in the 9th Annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies. Below is the full text of the speech. Good afternoon. My name is Olha Volkhina, and I represent the Center for Fiscal Policy Research. Today, I will present our work on ensuring transparency in monitoring Ukraine’s recovery spending during wartime. For over three years, Ukraine has been facing a full-scale war. According to the Ukraine Recovery and Reconstruction Needs Assessment (RDNA4), the cost of recovery exceeds half a trillion dollars. This includes the rebuilding of housing, schools, roads, water supply systems, and other critically important infrastructure. Despite the massive needs, national resources are extremely limited. In 2024, nearly the entire state budget — about 3 trillion hryvnias — was allocated to defense. Only around 50 billion was left for reconstruction. This means that every hryvnia spent must be justified. Transparent. Accountable. That’s where our work begins. Transparency is not just a buzzword — it is our most important strategic asset. It helps us earn the trust of our citizens, who want to know where public money is going. It helps us maintain the trust of international donors, who want to see real results and accountability.And just as importantly, transparency helps government institutions themselves make informed decisions based on accessible and reliable data. In recovery, transparency is not an accessory — it is the foundation. At the Center for Fiscal Policy Research, we have built a comprehensive system for monitoring recovery financing. We work with official sources: government resolutions, data from the Spending portal, and public procurement through Prozorro. The most difficult part is verification. We cross-check, clarify, and validate the data. Verification is the core of our work. Data without trust is just noise. We match payments with Treasury reports. When something doesn’t align, we send official requests to ministries and local authorities. We transform scattered numbers into structured, open data sets and — most importantly — into interactive tools that the public can use. These datasets are available on our official website, and we also publish them on platforms such as Kaggle and Discuss Data. One example of our work is the dashboard we created for the Fund for Eliminating the Consequences of Armed Aggression. This budgetary fund was established to finance everything from housing to infrastructure. Our interactive tool displays every project on a map — you can zoom in on any community, see who received funding, how much was allocated, and what has already been implemented. In addition to the map, the dashboard includes treemaps by sector, spending graphs, and rankings of the largest contractors and fund recipients. Filters allow users to search for information by sector — education, transport, healthcare — anything. One way to explore the potential of this tool is to analyze the recovery efforts in the education sector in Kharkiv — a city that suffered significant destruction early in the war. With the dashboard, anyone can see how funding has been distributed among individual school reconstruction projects: how much was planned, how much was spent, and who the contractors are. These cases can highlight both successful projects and signal issues in planning, delays related to security conditions, or limited implementation capacity at the local level. The dashboard is not a tool for blame — it is a tool for understanding. It helps stakeholders and oversight bodies focus where attention is most needed to improve recovery governance. In the Kyiv region, we collaborated with the Regional Military Administration to track recovery spending from national, local, and international sources. A telling example is the restoration of a residential building in Irpin, which was financed through a combination of state budget funds, local government funds, and contributions from the United24 initiative. The dashboard visualizes the full funding structure of such projects, offering a clear and accessible picture of how different sources come together to support recovery. This tool is especially valuable for local civil society organizations, journalists, and grassroots groups monitoring recovery on the ground. With accessible and transparent financial data, they can track the flow of funds, identify gaps, and actively participate in oversight and advocacy efforts. We also track international recovery programs, such as the Emergency Credit Program for the Recovery of Ukraine by the European Investment Bank, which has allocated over 3.5 billion UAH to date. We don’t just verify and analyze this data — we actively share it with key oversight institutions. For example, we plan to provide verified datasets to the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine and the State Audit Service to strengthen their audit work. These datasets will help auditors operate more effectively by giving them access to structured and reliable project-level information. We are also in dialogue about sharing these datasets with the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) to enhance international oversight and ensure even greater transparency in the use of donor funds. What does this achieve? Citizens can track local projects. Civil society organizations can advocate more effectively. Donors can see actual implementation — not just promises.And authorities at all levels can use the same data for better planning, more efficient coordination, and quicker response. When data is open, everyone benefits. But beyond tools and dashboards, we are helping shift the culture of governance — from a closed system to an open one built on dialogue between citizens, officials, and partners. Data becomes the shared language of recovery. Allow me to summarize: First, transparency is not just an ethical value. In times of crisis, when needs are vast and resources are limited, transparency becomes a practical necessity. Second, data must be verified in order to be truly useful. Without trust in the numbers, analysis and oversight lose their meaning. Third, the tools we build must be inclusive — serving not only experts but everyone. This is how recovery becomes more than just a technical process — it becomes a national practice of resilience, built on openness, shared awareness, and collective responsibility. Thank you for your attention.