NAZK
The National Agency for Prevention of Corruption is changing its approach to selecting and checking the declarations of civil servants and will rely on artificial intelligence in some of its processes. This was reported by the press service of one of the main anti-corruption bodies following a special briefing.
Previously, part of the body’s responsibilities was an annual check of the declarations of all top officials, so declarations were selected for a full check depending on the category of position, primarily the President of Ukraine, ministers, people’s deputies, judges of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, the Supreme Court, explain in NAZK. More than 99% of declarations were outside the systemic control of the NAZK, and verification of employees of other positions was carried out only based on requests from citizens, materials from journalistic investigations, or as part of cooperation with law enforcement agencies. And this led to public disappointment with the work of the department in terms of checking declarations, admits the deputy chairman of the NAZK Artem Sytnik.
New risk-oriented approach of the NACP to verifying declarations of officials
As the NAZK notes, a pause of one and a half years (suspension of mandatory filing of declarations and their verification) helped speed up the development of the necessary IT products for the implementation of a new (more flexible) approach. The goal is to automate some tasks to make full audits a more effective financial control tool. Now declarations will be selected on a risk-based basis, that is, depending on the risk rating indicator. This became possible thanks to changes in the Law of Ukraine «On the Prevention of Corruption» — the new edition eliminates the obligation to annually check all declarations of top officials.
The new NAZK model provides that all submitted declarations will undergo a risk assessment (read: examination), and those that have the lowest risk rating and are subject to automated verification will be verified using artificial intelligence, a special automated verification mechanism. We are talking about comparing the declaration data with other registers, checking with certain «formulas», for example, to identify signs of illegal enrichment, the presence of unjustified assets, etc. Based on the results of the auto-check, the system will generate an appropriate record as evidence of a minimum risk coefficient. At the same time, such a certificate will not mean passing a full audit, the NAZK notes and predicts that a third of declarations will undergo automatic verification. In case of discovery of new facts or requests for signs of false declaration, NAZK reserves the right to initiate a full audit.
Out of the remaining 70% of declarations, NAZK authorized persons will select declarations with a high risk rating for a full audit – they will also be distributed by an automated system. This completely eliminates the possibility of human intervention in the auto-check or auto-distribution procedures. This work will be performed by «piece of hardware» using software products for which, as NAZK assures, protection measures have been taken.
It’s ironic that in a recent Kantar survey, Ukrainians named the fight against corruption as one of the most promising areas of application of AI. I also remember how at the previous pre-war Diia Summit 2.0, Vladimir Zelensky said that “a computer has no friends or godfathers, it does not take bribes, even in bitcoins.”