BEB after the reform: weak performance and dissonance between claims about “discriminatory” salaries and reality

The reform of the Bureau of Economic Security, which was presented as a break with the old punitive practice, has not yet proven to have really changed the essence of this body. Formal steps have been taken, but the country has never seen the promised effect in the form of de-shadowing of the economy, high-profile cases of exposing large-scale schemes and a tangible filling of the State Budget. At the same time, the leadership of the Bureau of Economic Security explains the poor performance of the work by a personnel shortage, as well as “discriminatory” salaries compared to other law enforcement agencies. However, these statements contradict the results of journalistic investigations, data from declarations of officials with expensive assets, information about their family businesses and traditional corruption within the system itself. The most acute issue of this situation is that after the reboot, the body that was supposed to bring order to the sphere of economic crimes, itself remained a source of contradictions and suspicions.

What the Reform of the Bureau of Economic Security Meant

The relationship between the state and business has long been tense, and for years entrepreneurs have seen one of the main reasons for this tension in the actions of law enforcement agencies. Visits by security forces to enterprises, searches, seizure of documents, equipment, and the actual blocking of companies’ work were too often perceived not as an instrument of legality, but as a method of corruption pressure. This practice became so recognizable that it was given a separate name – “mask show”, which later turned into a symbol of state intervention, from which business expected not protection, but another threat.

For many years, the parliament and the government declared their intention to put an end to this system, but none of the previous attempts removed the very mechanisms that fueled corruption. In 2021, a law was passed that was supposed to take away the investigation of economic crimes from various law enforcement agencies and transfer this function to the newly created Bureau of Economic Security. It was the BEB that was to replace the tax police, to which the business community had accumulated perhaps the most complaints.

The further reform of the BEB, enshrined in Law No. 3840-IX in June 2024, from the very beginning had a double burden: on the one hand, the bureau was required to carry out internal cleansing and a new work model, and on the other, it was required to fulfill its obligations to international partners, primarily the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. That is, the BEB found itself at a point where the country’s institutional reputation, the state’s budgetary interests, and the everyday security of business converged in one node.

The new reboot model was not limited to replacing a few officials or cosmetic adjustments to procedures, because the center of the reform was a complete renewal of the body. The most noticeable step was the decision to hold a transparent competition for the position of BEB director with the participation of international experts, who were given the decisive vote in the competition commission. This approach looked like an attempt to break the usual logic of backroom management selection for Ukrainian institutions, when a formal procedure exists, and a key decision is made outside of a competition.

At the same time, re-certification of employees has become one of the main tests of the seriousness of intentions. The law provides for a mandatory check of the entire staff of the bureau after the appointment of a new director in order to eliminate dishonest employees. The logic here is simple, albeit harsh: an agency that is supposed to investigate financial crimes cannot maintain trust if it has personnel with negative reputational baggage from previous work. Therefore, the reform provided for the creation of a new certification commission and the formation of a new staff.

Behind the personnel block was another line of changes, without which the BEB could hardly have lost its reputation as a “punitive” instrument of pressure on business. The reform provided for strengthening the independence of the bureau by reducing the influence of other authorities on its activities, so that investigations of financial crimes would not depend on the political situation. In practical terms, this was linked to the expectation that investigations should be free from pressure from political centers, in particular the Office of the President or the government.

To make this independence tangible and transparent, the reform included a requirement for an annual independent audit of the BEB’s activities involving international experts. Such a norm works as an external control mechanism, because it forces the bureau to explain its own effectiveness not only in reports for internal use, but also before an assessment that goes beyond the departmental circle. For an agency that has long been associated in business with pressure rather than professional analytics, an audit is no less important than a competition for a director.

A noticeable emphasis was also placed on digitalization, because the bureau was expected to transition from a force model to an analytical investigation of economic crimes. The introduction of modern analytical tools was supposed to look like a change in the bureau’s philosophy. The forceful approach usually relies on searches, pressure and the demonstrative presence of a state body, while the analytical approach relies on data, risk profiles, connections between schemes and the ability to see systemic abuses where a single episode does not yet create a complete picture. The BEB was expected to stop wasting resources on mechanical interference in the work of honest businesses and focus on complex schemes that really corrode the tax and financial system.

It should be noted that due to this shift, the key goals of the reform also changed. One of the main expectations was related to the de-shadowing of the economy and the filling of the State Budget, primarily in those sectors where the risks are traditionally the highest: tobacco, alcohol, fuel. In these industries, the state had been losing significant funds for years through shadow mechanisms, and therefore the updated bureau was expected to cover up tax evasion schemes and the so-called “twists” of value-added tax. If we compare the old and new model of expectations, the difference is striking: previously, the result often came down to the number of forceful actions taken, while after the reform, the measure of success was to be the reduction of the shadow segment and an increase in real revenues to the State Budget.

The task of changing the business climate was no less clearly formulated, since the distrust of entrepreneurs in the BEB arose due to the experience of unjustified pressure and searches. From the reboot, it was expected that the bureau would begin to work according to a risk-oriented approach, when attention is focused on systemic schemes, and not on the planned persecution of those who work without violations. In this sense, the reform was supposed to draw a line between the true protection of the economic interests of the state and the practice in which any contact of business with the law enforcement system turned into a source of threat.

A separate dimension of the reform is associated with international support, and here the significance of the BEB goes far beyond the framework of internal administrative restructuring. The implementation of the IMF structural beacons and the conditions of the Ukraine Facility program, which were called necessary for receiving macro-financial assistance in the amount of more than 21 billion euros, put the bureau’s reboot among the steps by which external partners assess the state’s ability to fulfill its own obligations. Because of this, the reform has become critically important for obtaining financing under the Ukraine Facility program. The logic here is clear: when a country requests large-scale support, it must prove that it is able not only to request, but also to rebuild the institutions on which the transparency of the economic environment, budget sustainability, and investor confidence depend.

As a result, expectations from the BEB reboot amounted to a much deeper transformation than a general renewal of the body. It was expected to provide a service that protects the state’s economic interests without political interference, reduces the share of the shadow economy, blocks tax schemes, fills the state budget, does not destroy the normal business environment, and at the same time meets the standards of transparency that international partners require of Ukraine.

Did the expectations from the BEB reform come true?

By the beginning of 2026, it became clear that the reform of the Bureau of Economic Security had yielded only partial results: the formal requirements of international partners were met, but the practical work of the body did not convince either business or a significant part of the expert community. What was presented as a reboot did not bring a rapid change in the quality of investigations, did not remove the main complaints of entrepreneurs and did not give a tangible effect. At the same time, the new head inherited old problems: unresolved legislative conflicts, missing territorial departments and dismissed employees who are suing the BEB en masse.

According to the results of 2025, the efficiency of transferring cases to court by the BEB was only about 13% percent, and out of thousands of open proceedings, a much smaller part reached real compensation for losses to the state than implied by the loud figures about “identified risks.” Because of this, the main subject of complaints to the bureau was not only the weak results and the publication of previous years’ achievements for its own successes, but also the very logic of reporting, under which the bureau operates with hundreds of billions of hryvnias of potential losses or identified risks, but these amounts do not translate into real revenues for the State Budget.

With this approach, the BEB statistics announced raise questions: how many real schemes have been stopped, how much money has actually been returned to the state, and how much less pressure has been placed on those who work legally?

At the same time, the personnel issue also remained problematic, because by the beginning of 2026, the BEB was staffed only by about a third of the required number, with only 9 out of 24 territorial departments fully operating, and lawsuits by former employees regarding payments brought the agency to the brink of financial instability. The ninth month of work of the new team has only reinforced this assessment: the BEB continues to be called “cluttered” and professionally insolvent.

It is worth noting that in a procedural sense, the reform has advanced. Ukraine fulfilled the International Monetary Fund’s structural beacon by adopting the law on the reboot of the BEB and appointing Oleksandr Tsyvinsky as its director in August 2025, which made it possible to receive the next tranches of international assistance. The recertification of employees with the participation of international experts has also begun, and the process itself is scheduled for early 2027. At the same time, this process is not a full-fledged cleansing, but a “change of sign”, since a significant part of the old tax police personnel remains in the system. Because of this, the institutional renewal has not yet turned into an undeniable renewal of practice.

Despite the promise to switch to an analytical approach, the problem of pressure on business has also not disappeared. Entrepreneurs continue to complain about unfounded criminal cases that are used to block the work of companies, while the “shadow” sector continued to retain more favorable conditions for itself. As a result, the state was unable to provide the market with equal conditions in many areas, including the electronics market, restaurant business, car sales, and the segment of excisable goods. It was in these areas that the reform was supposed to have a quick and tangible effect, because these were large sectors where honest business loses to those operating without proper registration.

However, the most acute failure of expectations is seen in the de-shadowing of the economy, which was one of the main arguments in favor of the reform. The business community, in particular the European Business Association, as well as the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Finance, Tax and Customs Policy Danylo Hetmantsev, point to the lack of a real breakthrough, because large-scale schemes in the alcohol and tobacco segment have survived, and the BEB has not demonstrated systemic victories in these areas. This affected tax revenues: in 2025, a 2.6% underperformance of the plan was recorded, and some estimates say the figure is 33 million hryvnias shortfall. If in 2024 an additional $2.5 billion was received from de-shadowing, then the next year the conversation was not about growth, but about losses and shortages.

Additionally, the situation is exacerbated by those markets where the state has been unable to restore order for years even at the level of basic control mechanisms. In the gambling business, due to the lack of a state online monitoring system, the State Budget loses 20 billion hryvnias per year, but responsibility for this disruption lies with both the BEB and the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the state agency “PlayCity”. At the same time, in the tobacco and alcohol markets, legal business constantly complains about blocking the implementation of electronic excise, without which talk about effective control sounds less and less convincing.

It is noteworthy that the State Budget has allocated over 2.18 billion hryvnias for financing the Bureau of Economic Security, while by the end of 2025, the BEB provided compensation for losses of 3.82 billion hryvnias. That is, each hryvnia of expenses returns approximately 2-3 hryvnias of income, but for an agency created as a key tool for combating economic crimes, this figure looks too modest. The Bureau spends resources on specific cases, while major sources of losses — smuggling, illegal alcohol, tobacco, and systemic shadow circulation — continue to receive no effective blow.

This problem is especially acute in comparison with the scale of the shadow economy, due to which the State Budget of Ukraine loses hundreds of billions of hryvnias every year. At the same time, the scale of these losses has become systemic: as of 2025, total losses from various schemes are estimated at UAH 429-543 billion per year, in 2024 this figure increased to UAH 375-603 billion against UAH 353.5-568 billion in 2023. Against this background, the shadow turnover of the economy exceeds UAH 800-900 billion annually, and the accumulated amount of unpaid taxes has already reached more than UAH 1 trillion, while the total volume of the “shadow” reaches about 19.3% of the gross domestic product. This turns the shadow sector into one of the most painful blows to the financial stability of the state in 2024-2026.

Additional skepticism is caused by BEB reports of over 141.5 billion hryvnias of identified risks in 2025, because these figures do not mean real money in the State Budget, but only record schemes that still need to be proven in court. Even where BEB demonstrates activity, as in the case of the tobacco market, where product seizures increased by 60% in 2025, the State Budget still loses over 26 billion hryvnias per year due to illegal cigarette trade. Added to this are losses on the illegal coffee market, where due to the gigantic volume of shadow circulation, the country is short of up to 7 billion dollars, that is, every second cup of the drink is sold outside official records. Such a difference between the volume of shadow circulation and the actual return of funds shows the main problem: BEB records schemes, but fights them too weakly.

Complaints about “discriminatory” salaries and real fortunes of BEB officials

The director of the Bureau of Economic Security, Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, publicly describes the BEB’s remuneration system as “discriminatory” and bases his argument on comparisons with other law enforcement and anti-corruption structures. Salaries in BEB, NABU, and SBI are calculated using the same formula — 22 subsistence minimums, but for BEB they use an underestimated figure of 2,102 hryvnias, while for NABU, SBI, and the High Anti-Corruption Court they use 3,028 hryvnias. Because of this difference, BEB employees receive about a third less, and the salary of a bureau detective lags behind the income of a NABU or SBI detective by 50–60%. Therefore, Tsyvinsky emphasizes the need to align the rules of accrual with other special agencies, because without this, in his opinion, the BEB is not able to compete for economists, analysts and IT specialists, whom the private sector pays 3-4 times more.

However, it is worth noting that as of April 2026, the basic salary of a BEB detective is 43,091 UAH, and that of a senior detective is 46,244 UAH. At the same time, the actual amounts, taking into account all possible additional payments (40% seniority bonus, additional payments for a special rank, for access to state secrets, academic degree), the actual amount of remuneration is almost 60,000 UAH after taxation, and for heads of departments it reaches 120-200 thousand UAH, which demonstrates a striking gap between the official salary and real remuneration. Although the BEB publicly complains about “low” salaries, compared to the incomes of most doctors, teachers, and other public sector employees, such amounts do not look low, but rather privileged.

The position of the BEB head has its own logic, but it loses its persuasiveness the moment a public complaint about “discriminatory salaries” is confronted with facts that contradict the image of a “low-income worker.” It is noteworthy that along with the “discriminatory salary”, Tsyvinsky, at the age of 44, receives 300 thousand hryvnias in pension thanks to службі в поліції, НАБУ, статусу учасника бойових дій і вислузі у 26 років. Особливо промовистим виглядає спосіб отримання такої пенсії в системі, де для звичайних пенсіонерів-силовиків обмеження в 10 прожиткових мінімумів діє автоматично, тоді як для «спеціальних» пенсіонерів з силового та правоохоронного середовища воно фактично нівельоване судами.

Ще гостріше суперечність недостатнього фінансування БЕБ проступає там, де керівництво бюро витрачає бюджетні кошти на сувенірну продукцію та ребрендинг. Як свідчать дані з ProZorro. Бюро економічної безпеки витратить майже чверть мільйона гривень на закупівлю атласних хусток, екосумок та сувенірної продукції, стели з гравіюванням та 28 видів значків вартістю 88 870 грн. Всі товари мають поставити до бюро на початку квітня цього року.

Крім того, БЕБ витрачає державні кошти на інші буденні закупівлі: 473 781 грн ‒ на побутові кондиціонери, 298 504 грн ‒ на шредери, 222 300 грн ‒ на захищені токени, 85 078,80 грн ‒ на зберігання вилученого транспорту, 75 000 грн ‒ на безконтактні картки Mifare, майже 62 000 грн ‒ на питну воду, 65 100 грн ‒ на конструкційні матеріали та ще 43 200 грн ‒ на налаштування IP-телефонії. Лише за цими наведеними закупівлями разом БЕБ витрачає 1,41 млн грн. Розрив між цими двома лініями — скаргами на брак ресурсу і готовністю витрачати гроші на другорядні речі — б’є по довірі до всієї управлінської логіки БЕБ.

Ще складнішу картину дають журналістські розслідування і декларації працівників бюро, в яких офіційні зарплати нерідко зовсім не стикуються з реальним масштабом майна і способу життя. Найвідомішим прикладом є колишній голова БЕБ Вадим Мельник, чия родина придбала квартиру в елітному київському житловому комплексі вартістю понад 1 мільйон доларів, а також квартиру в курортному районі Одеси «Аркадія», куплену за 1 мільйон 130 тисяч гривень — вдвічі дешевше за ринкову вартість на момент купівлі.

Поширеною традиційно практикою працівників БЕБ, як і інших українських посадовців, є укриття реальних доходів, запис майна на дружин, тещ або батьків-пенсіонерів. Прикладом цього є тимчасовий виконувач обов’язків голови територіального управління БЕБ у Львівській області «безхатько» Михайло Борусовський, який задекларував проживання родини в орендованій квартирі власника продовольчого ринку на Сихові.

Крім цього, 68-річна мати керівниці волинського теруправління БЕБ Лариси Ревіної «потайки від своєї доньки» стала співвласницею паливного бізнесу, який швидко почав приносити мільйонні прибутки. Після журналістського розслідування про бізнес матері та брата Ревіна звільнилася.

Історія керівника БЕБ у Закарпатській області, який раніше працював заступником керівника ТУ БЕБ у Чернівецькій області, Євгенія Калугіна виглядає ще масштабніше: його матір стала співвласницею компанії «Голден Блек», яка розбудовувала мережу заправок на Буковині. Водночас дружина через іншу компанію взяла в кредит дві будівлі АЗС за 40 мільйонів гривень, далі з’явилися земельна ділянка біля Чернівців з басейном, рестораном і нічним клубом Black Lotus. Після переведення Калугіна на Закарпаття була придбана ще й земля на словацькому кордоні в Ужгороді, де подружжя почало будувати таунхауси.

Також під час перевірок кандидатів на керівні посади в БЕБ спливали історії про апартаменти в Туреччині, дорогі позашляховики на кшталт Toyota Land Cruiser і BMW X5, куплені під час війни, причому стандартними поясненнями знову ставали «подарунки від батьків» або старі заощадження від бізнесу. Декларації окремих співробітників містили сотні тисяч доларів і євро готівкою, які пояснювали продажем майна, хоча задокументована вартість проданого часто виглядала значно нижчою. Окремим каналом легалізації великих витрат є грошові подарунки від родичів на 1–5 мільйонів гривень і безвідсоткові позики від третіх осіб. Разом з цим існують кримінальні сюжети з «корупційною рентою», в яких йде мова про регулярні платежі від нелегальних виробників сигарет за «неперешкоджання діяльності» та хабарі за невнесення онлайн-казино до переліку ризикових об’єктів.

Отже, ці на безліч інших прикладів ніяк не корелюються з «дискримінаційними зарплатами» посадовці БЕБ. За такої картини головна суперечність виглядає надто очевидною: керівництво БЕБ пояснює слабкість органу низькими зарплатами, тоді як реальна ситуація свідчить про дещо іншу картину.

У підсумку сподівання на реформу БЕБ виправдалися лише в тій частині, яка стосується інституційного оформлення змін: новий закон ухвалено, директора призначено, атестацію розпочато. Однак там, де мали з’явитися практичні наслідки реформи — наповнення Держбюджету, системна детінізація економіки, боротьба з економічними злочинами і припинення тиску на чесний бізнес, — результат залишається слабким.

Як бачимо, ситуація в Україні має традиційну стабільність у всіх державних органах, коли вирішується питання щодо їх реформування. За фасадом перезавантаження БЕБ так і не з’явився орган, здатний швидко і жорстко ламати великі тіньові схеми, бо реформа запустила нові процедури, але не прибрала ключові причини старих проблем і зовсім не збирається боротися з корупцією у власних рядах.