Less than half of government data in Ukraine meets the requirements of the law on openness
As of March 2025, less than half of government data in Ukraine meets the requirements of the law on openness — the overall transparency rate is only 44.21%, according to analysis OpenDatabot.
This indicator reflects the extent to which government agencies comply with the requirements of the Open Information Act—in particular, the principles of openness by default, responsiveness, accuracy, availability, reusability and comparability of data. And although there is a slight increase over the year – last year the level was even lower – Ukraine is still far from the indicators of the pre-war period.
Before the full-scale invasion began, the openness rate reached 57.6%. That is, the war pushed the country back at least six years in terms of transparency and availability of public information. In the first days of the invasion of the Russian Federation, the state authorities closed most of the registers to avoid the leakage of sensitive data to the enemy. Although some of the information systems have already been restored, many registers are still closed or partially accessible.
The positive dynamics of the rating is due to the fact that a number of authorities are gradually returning to the practice of publishing open data. For example:
– The National Civil Service Agency again publishes the list of civil service vacancies;
– The Ministry of Justice has improved the data in the ASVP and Unified Register of Debtors sets (although the ERB itself is not published in an open data format);
– The Ministry of Education and Science opened access to the Register of subjects of educational activity;
– NAZK resumed the publication of declarations in API format.
However, at the same time, there are also negative trends. For example, the State Judicial Administration stopped publishing judicial statistics on the open data portal, although it is partially available on the website of the institution itself.
The worst situation is with the State Tax Service, which stopped publishing almost all of its open data sets after the start of the Great War. All that remains is aggregated information on the amount of VAT refunds — and even that is provided without detail. As a result, the Tax Office has the lowest rate among all central executive authorities — only 0.2%.
The category of the least open state institutions also includes:
– Pension Fund of Ukraine,
– Motor (transport) insurance bureau,
– Ministry of Social Policy,
– Ministry of Economy.
These bodies do not fulfill the basic requirements of the law regarding transparency, and some of them do not update any data sets at all.
Instead, the highest level of adherence to the principles of openness was demonstrated by:
– Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine;
– Ministry of Internal Affairs;
– State judicial administration (despite the mentioned statistical limitations).
Although there is progress towards restoring data openness in Ukraine, the overall level of transparency remains critically low. Less than half of the data meet international standards. And if a certain restriction of access to public information can be justified in the conditions of martial law, then delaying the return to openness is not. Without restoring transparency, there will be no effective control over the government, no full-fledged democracy, and no trust in the state.
