The National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) has made its first payment to a corruption whistleblower. The reward went to a serving serviceman who was the director of the Ministry of Defence's internal audit department in 2020-2021. In 2021, he informed the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) that he had been offered UAH 24 million for a positive internal audit report on the implementation of a government contract. In this way, the company would have received full payment of UAH 400 million for the arrangement of the special facility and could have applied for future contracts with the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine.
This possibility was already introduced in 2019, but no payments have been made so far due to the lack of regulated procedures. According to NACP head Viktor Pavlushchyk, the first payment was made possible by a change in the procedure for using funds earmarked in the state budget for the implementation of anti-corruption strategies.
The amount received by the whistleblower was not disclosed. According to the law, a whistleblower may be paid 10% of the monetary value of the object of a corruption offence or the amount of damage caused to the state by the offence after a court conviction. However, the amount may not exceed three thousand minimum wages established at the time of the offence.
The protection of whistleblowers was also discussed at the fourth annual conference "Whistleblowers in Ukraine: Successes and Challenges". Svitlana Musiiaka, NAKO Head of Research and Policy Development, moderated the roundtable, where experts discussed whistleblower protection in the context of state secrets and Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration.
Photo: NACP