The road to nowhere: million-dollar salaries of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and meager salaries of people's deputies

When the register of declarations on the website of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) first became operational, journalists rushed to analyze the declarations of people's deputies. And in the first years, during the work of the parliament of the previous convocation, it was possible to see a series of materials about oligarchs, landlords, collections of watches, icons and fur coats.

Due to the introduction of martial law, the registry was closed, and it took a long time to restore it. And finally, the declarations for 2022 have appeared. And for the first time in the history of the analysis of declarations, attention should be paid not to the incomes of people's deputies, but to the ratio of incomes of employees of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, heads of committee secretariats and people's deputies who head committees. And this is especially relevant in the context of civil service reform.

It's not about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. The state must ensure fair working conditions.

The public initiative "Holka" compared the incomes of heads of committee secretariats with the incomes of committee heads. In addition, the incomes of the heads of the secretariats, who receive, in fact, three times more, are also mentioned. The declarations of 2022 were taken into account.

And if you look at the declarations of the leadership of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, its head, Viacheslav Shtuchnyi, received almost 3 million hryvnias per year, his deputies, Artem Yanchuk and Mykola Shevchuk, received 2.5 million. The salaries of committee heads are 5-6 times lower.

By the way, committee heads also have completely different volumes of work. This is due to the fact that a different number of issues are considered and a different number of meetings are held. Thus, the number of meetings of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech in the country under the leadership of People's Deputy Nestor Shufrych, who is accused of treason, was almost zero in 2022, but the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on issues of budget, for example, meets quite often.

"The situation in which people's deputies, heads of committees, receive 3-4 times less than their subordinates, heads of committee secretariats, is absurd from the point of view of management. The political and legal responsibility of the people's deputy and the chairman of the committee is incomparably greater. Under such conditions, the state policy on remuneration leads to an increase in corruption risks. People's deputies, especially in conditions of war, when elections cannot be held, are strongly responsible for the protection of sovereignty, and such a policy devalues their role. Such a level of salary payment speaks of the inadequacy of the state policy, which is aimed at making deputies non-subjective", – emphasizes People's Deputy Yuliia Klymenko of the "Voice" party.

And here it should be noted that until recently representatives of the "Voice" party did not head committees at all (People's Deputy Yaroslav Yurchyshyn headed the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Freedom of Speech after the arrest of Shufrych just before the new year). And that is why the opposition People's Deputy from the "Voice" party, Yulia Klymenko, when she talks about higher salaries for committee heads, does not defend them for representatives of her party, but emphasizes that such an approach is really wrong.

In order to understand whether they plan to solve the current situation, the public initiative "Holka" turned to the head of the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on issues of budget Roksolana Pidlasa ("Servant of the people"):

"Increasing the salaries of people's deputies is currently not planned, because it is not a matter of first necessity in society during the war and will be perceived with great misunderstanding," she said.

​How did it happen that, due to populism, the salaries of people's deputies are not raised, and the staff of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine receive millions?

Ukraine has always had a problem with officials' incomes. The official salary could be a penny, and the bonuses could be sky-high. To prevent this from happening, our partners demanded, within the framework of civil service reform, to balance the payment of salaries of civil servants according to the "70 to 30" formula. That is, the salary should have been 70%, and the bonus – no more than 30%. This does not make the employee completely dependent on the manager's mood. But this norm somehow fell out of the basic law on civil service, adopted in 2015. And the partners, of course, continue to insist on the European norm.

At the end of 2023, ZN.UA wrote that the government decided to balance the payment of salaries system in a very strange way, namely through a line in the 2024 state budget and a government resolution without a basic draft law, which was supposed to implement a system of classification of salaries and positions. And here, in the general chaos, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine cheated, protecting its apparatus in the final provisions: the conditions of payment of civil servants, which are determined by other provisions, are not applied when determining the payment of salaries of civil servants of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk and Vice-speaker Oleksandr Kornienko specified this in the draft state budget with amendments.

That is, nothing will change for the representatives of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Employees of this state agency have received millions and will continue to receive them. At least this year.

"The motivation of the five people's deputies who submitted amendments No. 300, 312 and 324 will remain in history. Some of them say that they were asked by other people's deputies, some say that they were asked by representatives of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. In any case, it should be thought through in the context of the law on honest lobbying, which the apparatus is trying to remove from the concept of "lobbyists". They voted for the budget, but how could you not vote for the war? They voted taking these amendments into account. These amendments brought the representatives of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine out of the fair model, and the publication of the declarations finally highlighted the abomination of the relationship between low-paid people's deputies and highly paid officials of the Apparatus. It is impossible to break this scheme from the inside, because people's deputies have long been dependent on whether the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine will give them something: a position to employ "their" person, or money from their sky-high incomes, etc.," notes the head of the Committee on Social Policy, Halyna Tretiakova.

People's deputy Tretiakova added that she was thinking about resigning from her post.

People's deputies themselves created a difficult and hopeless situation because of their populism. And during the war, the work of the parliament was under threat, and a dangerous situation for institutional capacity is developing, when the confrontation between the People's Deputies and the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is intensifying.

And all this is happening at a time when there is a serious threat to parliamentarism, because in the conditions of war, the subjectivity of the parliament has already been significantly undermined in favor of the office of the president of Ukraine.

In such conditions, it becomes more and more difficult to keep people's deputies in the session hall. The head of the "Servant of the People" faction, Davyd Arakhamia, publicly said that several dozen people's deputies would like to resign from their positions. And this is what the enemy needs, namely to slow down the work of state authorities.

But it is not only about the parliament. After some of the government officials in the parliament cheated and created exclusive conditions for their apparatus, the New Year's race with the "staff" gathered momentum, because the working conditions changed in the sector of civil servants and the "labor market" of the civil service reacted.

Everyone wanted to make sure that his apparatus was in no worse conditions than in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. We remind you that such a situation arose in the Supreme Court of Ukraine.

The number of departments is added – administrations appear. Management is multiplying – departments are emerging. Or independent units of the apparatus are created. This is how the number of managers increases, and the level of the unit also increases. And this has a positive effect on the salary. On paper, everything looks quite simple – the number of employees is not increasing.

We compare the staff schedule of the Supreme Court of Ukraine in 2023 and 2024. The "differences" column shows the new departments and managements that have been created.

Regarding the imbalance of salaries of people's deputies and heads of committee secretariats, the Deputy Minister of Finance of Ukraine, Roman Yermolychev, emphasizes that unequal pay conditions have indeed appeared in accordance with the final provisions of the law on the state budget for 2024.

"If the people's deputies had protected the apparatus in this way, there would not have been such strong differences in the payment of salaries of the employees of the Apparatuses of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and other civil servants. The salary of a people's deputy is set directly by the Parliament of Ukraine. The topic of raising salaries for people's deputies is really unpopular among society.

​People usually compare their income and the income of politicians, of course, not in their favor. This is infuriating. If there is a consensus in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on the need to increase the salaries of people's deputies, they must adopt changes to the budget. It should also be understood that when we talk about the current budget, we need a source from where we will take funds. The government does not interfere in this issue, because it is a purely political decision of the people's deputies. It is possible that the budget for next year will allow for a higher salary when the economic situation stabilizes. But even this will require political consensus and a clear understanding of the sources from which such expenses will be covered. The issue of raising salaries in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has always been unpopular, and during martial law it is felt especially acutely," explains the deputy minister.

The state should reform the civil service so that the payment of salaries and bonuses are not simply in the ratio of 70% to 30%. The income must correspond to the level of responsibility and complexity of the tasks performed by the civil servant. All this should be clearly recorded in the basic law, which should implement the system of classification of salaries and positions.

And people's deputies cannot create unique conditions for the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, because this deforms the conditions of payment of labor in the entire civil service sector. Playing populism with the salaries of people's deputies in the parliament can be very expensive for the whole country.

Read this article in Ukrainian and russian.