The Transparent Cities program of Transparency International Ukraine has decided not to grant the status and place in the 2024 Transparency Ranking of 100 Largest Ukrainian Cities for the first time in the history of the assessment. The reason is deliberate swapping of publications on the official website of the Ternopil City Council and provision of false information.
While preparing two separate research projects, the analytical team discovered that the official responses of the Ternopil City Council to the organization's requests contained falsified data. In particular, for the city’s evaluation in the Open Data Pulse Ranking, the city council provided a link to a fake news story about a hackathon that had never happened.
Screenshot of the news article “Open Data Hackathon took place in Ternopil: new services based on communities’ open data,” dated August 12, 2024, accessed via the link provided by the Ternopil City Council.
Within the 2024 Transparency Ranking of 100 Cities, several other manipulations were revealed: the links to materials about training sessions for officials previously contained texts about leisure activities for the older individuals. A check through the Wayback Machine confirmed that the old publications had been retroactively swapped to improve the ranking.
In response to the program's request, the Ternopil City Council acknowledged “improper control” and “submission of incorrect links,” but did not admit to falsification, conduct a full internal investigation, identify those responsible, or propose measures to prevent such violations in the future. It only had a “meeting” and provided instructions to “adhere to labor discipline.”
Excerpt from the Ternopil City Council’s response letter of April 9, 2025.
The principled position of Transparency International Ukraine is that transparency cannot be imitated. Providing deliberately false information, particularly on official sources, is a violation of the current legislation and ethical norms of public governance, which ultimately discredits the very idea of public reporting.
Such situations are unacceptable. To avoid this, local authorities must develop strong and independent internal control systems. And the parliament should finally adopt legislation that will ensure proper and proportionate oversight of the legality of local government activities. Unfortunately, Ternopil City Council has proved to be a rather weak institution, and its actions can be explained by a conscious (political?) decision to support falsifications for the sake of high positions in the research.
“Transparency is not about numbers in a ranking. It's about integrity, trust, and responsibility for the public word. We do not seek to ‘punish’ local governments, we seek to protect the principles of good governance and help build resilient and sustainable systems. We publicly defend the line – manipulations on city council websites for the sake of positions in the rankings are unacceptable. And no previous achievements will overturn this,” said Andrii Borovyk, Executive Director of TI Ukraine.
The analytical team has also studied other cities for similar violations, strengthened the research methodology, and will introduce serious changes in the approaches to evaluation to prevent similar situations in the future.
The presentation of the results of the Transparency Ranking 2024 will take place on May 19. Details of the annual research will be published on the platforms of Transparent Cities and Transparency International Ukraine.