Financial statements of companies will be opened in Ukraine: it will be possible to watch it online

 On March 3, 2021, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted amendments to Resolution No. 835: it defines the data sets that the state must publish openly.

Among such information: data on the land registry, on ERU debt, the quantitative composition of vaccines against COVID-19, the number of vacant beds in hospitals with oxygen supplies, as well as data from the financial statements of Ukrainian state and private companies (does not apply to FOPs).

BRDO and OpenUp participated in the preparation of the document, its draft can be viewed on the website of the Cabinet of Ministers.
How company reporting is available now

As clarified in BRDO, in Ukraine a large amount of information about companies has long been available online: about their leaders, types of activities, beneficiaries. Financial statements should be published in the same way, but in practice this does not happen. Such information can only be purchased illegally on the Internet.

Such reporting should contain data on:

    income;
    costs;
    profit and loss;
    the number of company employees, etc.

It can be obtained by sending a request to the company (under the Accounting Law, Art. 14). These data should be published by government agencies like the State Statistics Service, the Ministry of Justice or the State Tax Service, but so far they are not doing this.

As Igor Samokhodsky, head of the ICT sector at BRDO, explains, the adopted resolution means that such information will have to be published in open data format on the data.gov.ua portal, and thanks to this it will become available in any services that work with open data: Opendatabot , Vkursi, YouControl, etc.

 the new edition of the decree prescribes the publication of such data in a machine-readable form (XML, CSV, JSON). And when this happens, any user will be able to view data on any Ukrainian company that pays taxes and submits reports.
Why is it important

If the State Statistics Service and the tax authorities open such data, it will affect several things at once. As Igor Samokhodsky explains, firstly, analytical services that work with open data, like the Clarity Project, will become even better, and secondly, such data will simplify the assessment of both an individual company and the whole market.

    “Everyone will be able to download a dataset and analyze the state of the market segment, the region, how much profit and jobs there are, which niche is profitable, etc.,” he notes.

Contractors will be able to assess the state of the company for cooperation, and applicants will be able to check if everything is in order with the employer.

But for this it is necessary that the state bodies, which have this data, begin to publish them.