Ukraine’s State Customs Service (SCS) recently participated in the first iteration of the Customs Integrity Perception Survey (CIPS) as a key part of its work with the WCO Anti-Corruption and Integrity Promotion (A-CIP) Programme for Customs and is taking the first steps to utilize the findings.

CIPS was developed under the WCO A-CIP Programme in 2019 and aims to assess quantitatively the perception of integrity in Customs by Customs officers and private sector stakeholders. It is structured around the ten key factors of the Revised Arusha Declaration (RAD) and is intended to help participating Customs administrations target and adjust anti-corruption and integrity promotion measures.  It forms an important part of a collection WCO tools that generate direct and indirect indicators that Customs Administrations can use as a composite means for measuring corruption.

Between 2 and 27 September, the CIPS in Ukraine collected responses from 448 SCS officials and 477 representatives from the private sector across 5 Customs regions. These numbers are large enough to allow for more than 95% statistical confidence levels that the Survey responses reflect the opinions of the total population of both groups.  With support from the WCO A-CIP Programme, through remote assistance and a series of workshops, SCS is developing a plan to use the survey findings to engage other stakeholders and guide integrity-related decisions and activities.  

Some preliminary examples of the results of this first CIPS survey in Ukraine have been published by the SCS on its website and include:

• Perceptions of Customs officials and private sector representatives aligned among most of the key factor areas of the Revised Arusha Declaration; for example both felt reasonably positive about SCS’s current levels of leadership and commitment, and reform and modernization progress.
• Most respondents in the private sector (89%) would choose to follow ethical behaviors such as refusing or ignoring the request for a bribe from an officer to speed up Customs procedures. The small number of respondents remaining, however, would agree to the bribe.
• More than 20% of private sector respondents said they did not feel safe to report instances of corruption. However, 100% of the respondents who had participated in integrity-related investigations with SCS reported a positive experience.
• Two-thirds of the respondents in the private sector confirmed that they never violate the rules of Customs despite the complexity of the regulations. In contrast, one-third of the respondents would have problems in complying with the rules because of their complexity.

Recently, an online version of CIPS became available to all WCO Members. In addition, the methodological guidelines, including questions used in the Survey, have been updated and are available to all WCO Members in English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish.

The WCO A-CIP Programme, funded by Norway, is a comprehensive initiative that provides technical assistance and capacity-building support to WCO Member administrations implementing integrity-related initiatives in line with the WCO Revised Arusha Declaration. The Programme aims to enhance the integrity and transparency of Customs operations and promote anti-corruption efforts. For more information, please contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org.