Improvement and enforcement of current legislation and constructive dialog with business were discussed during a working meeting between representatives of the Business ombudsman council and Acting Director of the Economic Security Bureau Andrii Pashchuk.

The meeting was attended by Business ombudsman Roman Vashchuk, his deputy Tetyana Korotka and the council's inspectors, members of the Expert group on interaction with law enforcement Tetyana Mykulska and Andrii Bondarchuk who directly process appeals from entrepreneurs.

"In the context of the ESBU relaunch, the business community is concerned about measuring the Bureau's effectiveness by the number of criminal proceedings initiated. This is an outdated KPI (Key Performance Indicators) of many law enforcement agencies which we would not like to see in the ESBU. In its work the Bureau should be guided by analytical methods of forensic analysis and not initiate criminal proceedings based on analytical certificates of the State Tax Service which often do not contain sufficient data for this but are perceived by the business community as pressure," said Roman Vashchuk, speaking about the business expectations from the reboot of the Bureau.

The BOC representatives also emphasized the importance of eliminating duplication of functions of law enforcement agencies and transferring all economic crimes to the ESBU. They proposed to establish an exchange of analytical data and launch working meetings of the ESBU with the business community in a new format which will allow to move from considering individual cases to more systemic issues.

For his part the Head of Bureau Andrii Pashchuk expressed readiness to create such a dialog platform with the participation of the Business ombudsman council: "We fully support this idea. After all one of the ESBU's tasks is to predict and identify negative phenomena in the economy and develop proposals to eliminate their preconditions. Consultations with business representatives can be a very effective tool for this purpose."

In addition, during the meeting, the participants discussed the practical aspects of applying a risk-oriented approach in the work of the BES and the legislative features of conducting procedural actions by the Bureau's detectives.