The workshop “Financial Verification of Assets Declarations” is being held for the representatives of the Commission
On 15th January 2018, a two-day workshop entitled “Financial Verification of Assets Declarations”, in which the members of the High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine, Commission inspectors and Commission's secretariat staff take part, has begun.
The workshop is held by international experts on combating corruption Mr. Tilman Hoppe (Germany) and Mr. Valts Kalnins (Latvia) in assistance with the USAID “New Justice” Program.
The main objectives of the two-day workshop are to highlight the concepts of verification of inexplicable wealth and conflicts of interest when investigating the asset declarations.
As the Chairman of the Commission Mr. Sergii Koziakov noted, the HQCJ has already experienced studying declarations during the judge qualification evaluation procedure, in particular, within the framework of the competition to the Supreme Court. The Commission cooperates with state authorities, receiving materials on judges and candidates in the framework of the special verification. Therefore, it is important to be able duly evaluate the information provided to the HQCJ.
The workshop participants learned how to track the financial flows within the declared data, how to effectively identify relevant data and analyze it. The experts also spoke about the peculiarities of the declaration system, in particular, in the most questionable sections.
Members of the Commission were interested in duly assets identification and verification without any assumptions. The experts explained the differences between the balance sheet, income, tax and asset declarations.
The material for this workshop is based on the financial methodology and certain examples from Sections 7 and 8 of the Council of Europe document “Practitioner manual on processing and analyzing income and asset declarations of public officials”.
Reference:
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) “New Justice” Program started its work in Ukraine in October 2016.
The purpose of the Program is to support the judiciary, Government, Parliament, Civil Society and people of Ukraine in the implementation of judicial reform given the constitutional amendments of 2016 and The Ukraine Judiciary Development Strategy 2015-2020.
The Program builds on the achievements of previous USAID projects “Ukraine: Rule of Law” and “Fair Justice” and uses their achievements for coordination of close cooperation with Ukrainian partners, USAID and US Government projects and other projects of international donor organizations in Ukraine.
