SBU, TSC branches in Ternopil ignore query by 20 Khvylyn on management salaries

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The Ternopil news outlet 20 Khvylyn submitted queries to six state bodies, asking about the salaries of their management, deputies, and advisors, with only oblast's National Police branch providing a full answer, says chief editor Natalia Burlaku to Iryna Nebesna, the regional Institute of Mass Information representative.

Burlaku says that the oblast council and the OMA provided some information, the city council asked them to pay for document scans, and the oblast branches of the SBU and the Territorial Staffing Center (TSC) ignored the query.

According to the chief editor, they decided to analyze not just the officials' salaries, but also what the money was paid for, so the queries were sent back in December.

The response from the National Police was timely and complete: they provided not just the overall figures, but also a monthly breakdown of all accruals. The oblast council limited itself to the total sums for two deputy chairs (at that time the oblast council had no chair – Author).

“The response contains the total monthly incomes of the deputies, but no data on the bonuses, allowances, additional payments, vacation pay, etc.,” explained Natalia Burlaku. The journalists' idea was not just to report the sums that the officials receive, but also to explain where the money comes from and for what.

It took two tries to obtain answers from the Ternopil OMA, and even then the information was incomplete. First, the journalists received a vague reply about which Cabinet of Ministers resolutions are the basis for calculating the salaries for the chair and deputies, without specifying the sums. The second time and after asking the OMA chair Vyacheslav Nehoda about the salaries in person during a briefing, the team received a more specific reply.

“The officials provided us with data on the total incomes of the OMA chair and deputies for 2024. Although in our query we asked to list all types of income for each month of 2024 separately,” emphasizes Natalia Burlaku.

The city council sent the journalists an invoice for making digital copies of documents instead of responding to the query.

“In response to our query about the salaries of the Mayor and his deputies, we were told the following: 'Since the information you requested is contained on 122 sheets… You need to pay the costs incurred for making digital copies of the documents in the amount of 336 UAH.' We are currently working with lawyers to prepare a response to the city council, asking them to provide us with generalized information, not copies of documents,” said the 20 Khvylyn chief editor.

The regional SBU branch first remarked to the journalist: “In the future, we recommend that you correctly identify the name of the legal entity about which you are requesting (collecting) information.”

According to 20 Khvylyn journalist Yana Polukhina, in her first query, instead of “SBU Department in Ternopil Oblast,” she simply wrote “SBU in Ternopil Oblast.” However, after correcting the name of the addressee, they received a reply stating that the SBU was not paying the salaries that the journalist asked to disclose, because the state guarantees “financial support” to military personnel and the SBU. Having sent a third query on December 18, the editorial team never received a response.

The media workers received no response to their first query to the regional TSC, either, so they sent a second one on January 21.

Roman Holovenko, media lawyer at the IMI, commented on these situations, noting that some of them are violations and some the media workers should study and learn from in the future, because there are details that information managers can use to catch them out, such as the words "financial support" instead of "salary" in their second request to the SBU.

“Howerver, they should have provided a response, such as a refusal or a notification that the query has been forwarded elsewhere, within five business days,” explains Roman Holovenko regarding the third query to the SBU and both queries to the TSC.

Incomplete responses to the requested information are also violations.

“In their response, the OMA omitted the payments to advisors, as well as breaking down the payments provided by the OMA by months and types (salary, bonuses, etc.). As for the advisors, according to Part 4 of Article 22 of the Law 'On Access to Information', the response should have explained the grounds for refusal. And as for the breakdown, it is obvious that the manager has the data and there is no reason not to provide it,” the media lawyer explains.

The situation is the same in the case of the oblast council.

As for the situation with the city council, offering the requester to pay for copying the documents so that they can look for information there themselves is manipulative, says the media lawyer. The journalists requested information, not documents.

“This is not a matter of the manager creating new information. After all, if the documents have numbers scattered across different pages or across different documents of the same type for different months, then summarizing these numbers by category in the response to the query is not creating new information. As for the response to the email, the situation with demanding payment for scanning documents is not so clear-cut. In 2020, compensation for scanning was added to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine’s resolution on the maximum costs of copying and printing,” explained Roman Holovenko.

20 Khvylyn have decided to submit complaints to the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights on the denial of access to public information.

As previously reported, in 2024, the Commissioner received 120 access denial complaints from Ternopil oblast. In 2023, there were 94, one being from journalist Yana Polukhina, who then worked with the website Misto. Only after that did the Ternopil OMA provide the media outlet with information on the salaries of their chair and his deputies.