Over the past year, most of the public authorities responsible for making and implementing the national policy in the energy sector have improved the quality of disclosing sectoral information from 36 to 50 out of the 100 possible points, DiXi Group experts concluded when working on the next edition of the Energy Transparency Index (ETI).

“When comparing the transparency of information disclosure by public authorities responsible for making and implementing the national policy in the energy sector, we noted that they are at approximately the same level of transparency, yet they still have different “black boxes” for different types of information that must be disclosed,” project’s expert Dmytro Naumenko says.

In the “Public authorities” category, the experts analyzed the transparency of spending budget funds; development, adoption and implementation of decisions by public authorities; formation of management bodies and the environment for publication of information in the open data format.

That concerns the Ministry of Energy and Environmental Protection of Ukraine (Energy and Environment Ministry), National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission (NEURC), and Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU).

“The relative leader of our rating is the AMCU thanks to the greater transparency of the competitive selection process; next comes the NEURC as a result of the better transparency in development, adoption and implementation of regulatory acts, and the Energy and Environment Ministry is at the bottom of the rating with somewhat worse transparency of its regulatory activity,” Mr. Naumenko stressed.

The ETI has revealed a traditional problem for public authorities: the disclosed data is insufficiently exhaustive, and moreover, it is often published not in a machine-readable format.

To fix this situation, DiXi Group experts recommend to publish reports on financial audits of the execution of budget programs and information regarding the course, and explanation of the outcomes, of contests selecting candidates for civil service positions.

Information published after discussing draft regulatory acts and monitoring the effectiveness of these documents is also incomplete. DiXi Group experts recommend the Energy and Environment Ministry, NEURC and AMCU to ensure regular monitoring of the effectiveness of their regulatory acts and publish fully informative reports on the results of this monitoring.

In addition, the AMCU is recommended to update the register of recipients of government assistance itemized down to the business entity level, and the Finance Ministry to create a register of quasi-fiscal transactions itemized to the business entity level.

For detailed information or to download the report, go to https://bit.ly/35iJaTm