Rational spending of state funds. Instructions for those who don't know where to start!
During a war, the maximum amount of money from the budget should go to providing for the army. Of course, in addition to this, it is necessary to provide for the country’s critical needs: repair roads so as not to disrupt logistics, build housing for displaced people, purchase electricity and gas for enterprises, provide hospitals with the necessary equipment to save the lives of defenders injured at the front.
Who determines what public funds will be used for? At the end of each year, the Verkhovna Rada approves the budget for the next year. The budget for 2024 allocated UAH 1.16 trillion for the Ministry of Defense. All planned expenses for next year are UAH 3.35 trillion. That is, at least a third will go to defense. Why at least? Because for 2023, 858 billion UAH were planned for defense (also about a third), and as of October, spending on it exceeded 1.4 trillion UAH and reached almost 60% of all state budget expenditures for 10 months of 2023.
Defense is a priority for the state now. And we see this from the budget. However, one of the problems is that we can finance it exclusively from our own income. But social security and other needs are partially covered by partners’ funds.
In addition to the state budget, there are also local ones. In particular, each community approves its own budget, where you can see the details of the expenses of your city or locality.
We have little money for anything other than the fight for Victory. Therefore, it is very important to spend them efficiently and without violations.
International Anti-Corruption Day is celebrated annually on December 9 at the initiative of the United Nations.
On December 9, 2003, a political conference was held in the Mexican city of Merida at which the UN Convention against Corruption was signed. This international treaty combats corruption, punishes those responsible, as well as mechanisms for international cooperation in the fight against it. It obliges member states to implement anti-corruption policies, adopt relevant laws and establish special bodies to combat this phenomenon.
The Convention entered into force in December 2005 after being ratified by 30 countries. Ukraine ratified the convention on October 18, 2006.
According to the UN Convention against Corruption (2003) and the Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention (1999), the term “corruption” means the abuse of public power to obtain benefits for personal gain, in the interests of third parties and groups, as well as various forms of misappropriation of public funds for private use.
Can citizens influence the budget?
Back in 2020, the Ministry of Finance approved recommendations on how local authorities can involve citizens in the formation of budgets. These include public hearings, round tables, and the creation of public councils and participation budget procedures, when people can submit their own projects for funding.
However, the first thing you can do is to analyze your community's draft budget when it is published (usually October-November). This is what, for example, the concerned citizens of Kyiv did this year. They found projects in the city budget that they considered uncritical: the construction of new interchanges and parking in Obolon. But they call for these funds to be redistributed to the needs of the army. They put all this into a petition, which received the required number of signatures in less than a week.
Communities have the right and can influence the budget. However, for this to be constructive, these should not be just calls, but specific proposals, as in “Money for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” This increases the chances that you will be able to truly influence and cause change, although it does not guarantee this 100%.
Where can I see what people are buying?
If the budget has already been adopted. Where can I see what people are buying with his money? Fortunately, in Ukraine everyone can monitor public procurement – on Prozorro. However, before you start, we highly recommend spending an hour of time to understand how procurement occurs: what the thresholds are, how to distinguish a tender from a non-tender, what is the difference between the expected cost and the contract amount.
Got it? Then you can get acquainted with the search on Prozorro. Start with something small and close to you: look at the procurement of your housing and communal services department or the nearest hospital, look at what they buy for your child’s school. By the way, purchases for schools are often carried out not by the schools themselves, but by local education departments. Did you think it would be easy?
Usually, Prozorro is quite enough to get started with procurement. But when you feel like a fish out of water and want to move to the next level, there is an even more powerful analytical tool from the Dozorro TI Ukraine team - BI Prozorro. There you can analyze purchases over time, compare regions and much more. But it takes more than a few hours to figure it out.
What to do if you find treason in procurement?
The algorithm of your actions will depend on what this betrayal consists of. But before that, we immediately warn you that the “Inform about violations” button to the State Audit Service in the upper right part of the page is not the best way to contact auditors. It works in the sense that you can leave a request, but auditors do not always read them and even less often respond to them.
But a useful link is to the material under the button, which explains in what cases you should contact auditors. Among them in particular:
if the customer chose the wrong procedure, for example, he bought directly, although he should have announced open tenders with special features;
wrongfully rejected an offer even though it met all the requirements;
on the contrary, he did not reject the offer, although he should have, because there are problems there.
If you did follow the link, you can see that most of the other grounds for contacting auditors involve violations related to all sorts of subtleties of the procurement process: deadlines, documents, and the like. To learn how to read tender documentation and understand all the nuances of the timing of the publication of procurement information, you need a little more than one article.
What about overpayments? Yes, you can write to auditors if you find an overpayment on purchases. For example, the cost of a product significantly exceeds the market price. For example, you looked at the estimate for the purchase of repairs and discovered that the foam blocks in it cost three times more than in online stores. Regarding overpayments, you can also write to the police and local prosecutor's office. We advise both them and auditors to write to the e-mail cells in your locality or region. Auditors have their own territorial bodies.
What if this purchase is simply inappropriate during a war? If you think that the costs of this purchase are very irrational, first of all we advise you to write to the customer himself and his governing body (for example, the city council, if this is his department). Neither the State Audit Office, nor the police, nor the prosecutor's office have the authority to oblige the customer to cancel a purchase because it is not relevant. This can only be done by the customer himself.
Who can help?
You probably already realized that procurement is not very simple? In fact, we are very lucky in Ukraine because they are electronic and as transparent as possible. But in most countries they are only partially open.
It really takes time to figure it out. But while you are just starting your journey as a public procurement monitor, you can enlist help. First of all, look for public organizations that monitor procurement in your region. Usually they are always happy to take on an appeal. If you couldn’t find it, write to us at Dozorro on Facebook.
The second good option is journalists. Perhaps your community has a good media outlet that sometimes covers procurement, in particular. You can contact its journalists if you come across suspicious purchases and have serious reasons to believe that there is important potential treason.
Relevant public organizations and journalists also have a lot of work, but in difficult cases they will usually be only happy to help you expose it: write to regulatory and law enforcement agencies and highlight it in the public space.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget about the power of social networks. You can post information about your find on Facebook or another social network.
A number of warnings (please read this too - this is very important)
It is important to remember why each of us undertakes to monitor purchases. We want to make Ukraine stronger, help win the war and rationally use already very limited means. Finding and destroying treason is a bad goal. Preventing a violation is good.
Therefore, it is very important to really understand the topic if you are going to control procurement. Or at least seek help from those who understand it.
Dozorro has been monitoring purchases for seven years and has identified a number of rules that should be followed:
1. Analyze carefully. Test hypotheses.
Ask your colleagues again . The work of buyers is very difficult, but not very highly paid. We don't want to wrongly blame them and cause them additional problems with unreasonable inspections.
2. Ask customers
If you find a violation, especially while the procurement is still ongoing, the easiest way to prevent it is the customer himself. At the same time, customers can provide you with information that is not available on Prozorro. For example, not so long ago we thought that we had found an overpayment on the purchase of a harvesting machine from Ukrzaliznytsia. It turned out that the kit she purchased included extra batteries. We hastened to communicate about the betrayal, and we are very offended by this.
3. Don’t give up.
Not all requests, even from our analysts and professional lawyers in the field, receive answers or lead to criminal proceedings. But a significant part does lead. Over the last year alone, we have opened 35 criminal proceedings based on our requests; auditors have confirmed violations in more than 180 requests. In another 42 cases, the violations were corrected by the customers themselves. And this is the motivation not to give up and continue to monitor.
