GAB is pleased to welcome this Guest Post by David Bernstein, an international development consultant and lawyer who spent more than 30 years working on rule of law, governance, and anticorruption programs at the State Department, the EBRD, and the World Bank. He recently served as one of the three international commissioners on the Selection Commission for the Head of Ukraine’s State Customs Service (SCS).

Our Commission was tasked with identifying two candidates to head the SCS from a list of finalists we were given. After interviewing the first few, my fellow international commissioners and I worried that we would be hard pressed to find even one to recommend to the Finance Minister and the Cabinet of Ministers; our potential dilemma was the Customs Code required us to name two. Fortunately, in the end we did find two, both investigators from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU): Ruslan Damentsov and Orest Mandziy. On April 10, 2026, the Cabinet, acting on the Finance Minister’s recommendation, appointed Mandziy as head of the SCS (the decision is here; the government’s announcement is here). Damentsov accepted the post of deputy head.

Ukraine pioneered the use of international experts to help select the heads of national agencies (here). Over the past several years, international experts have played a key role in selecting the heads of NABU, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, and the Economic Security Bureau, as well as the judges of the High Anti-Corruption Court (here). Ukrainian civil society, many members of the Verkhovna Rada, and key international donors believe that international participation in selection commissions can help combat systemic corruption in key institutions and build or sustain public trust in anticorruption and law enforcement agencies. This post describes how the process worked, why it was possible, and what lessons my experience on the SCS Selection Commission offers for the future.

Why are internationals involved in a domestic selection process?

The premise behind international selection commissions is that institutional corruption in Ukraine is so entrenched that even a well-intentioned government does not have the reach and the capability to select the leaders of key agencies through ordinary processes. To address both the perception and the reality of deep-seated institutional corruption, Ukraine has chosen to share power over appointments to ensure for greater integrity and public trust.

The tool has spread steadily through Ukraine’s institutions. It began with the High Anti-Corruption Court, moved to the leadership of the anticorruption bodies, then to the judiciary (first the judicial qualification body, then the judges of key courts) and to prosecutors. It has now reached institutions that collect revenue or investigate crime, such as the SCS and the Economic Security Bureau.

The Poroshenko government did not adopt international selection commissions willingly, and it is doubtful that the Zelensky government would have continued and expanded their use without three pressure points applied in coordination:

• Financial leverage. IMF and World Bank loan conditionality explicitly required an international role in selecting key officials as an anticorruption measure. Selecting the SCS head through an open competition with international experts was an IMF structural benchmark (see p. 26, para. 21). The EU and the United States have both funded the secretariats that support selection commissions and nominated experts to serve as international commissioners.
• Civil society. Ukraine’s anticorruption CSOs actively and vocally pushed for including international experts in the legal provisions governing the selection of agency heads. Some also took a hands-on role, investigating applicants themselves and passing information to the selection commissions.
• Champions in the Rada. Reformers in parliament worked with CSOs and international donors to ensure that legislation authorized international selection commissions and set out their basic procedures and voting rules.

How the competition worked

Our Selection Commission got off to a slow start. Ukraine’s international partners nominated experts between December 2024 and January 2025, but it was not until August 2025 that the government named three Ukrainian businesspeople as its commissioners and formally announced the commission’s formation. I believe the anticorruption street protests in Kyiv in summer 2025 refocused attention on corruption and led Ukraine’s international partners and donors to press anew for the selection process to begin.

With the help of an experienced team of Ukrainian lawyers and staff (our secretariat), the six member commission used its initial virtual meetings to draft Rules of Procedure and Procedure for Conducting the Competition. As required by law, and to promote transparency and trust, all of these meetings were broadcast live on the government’s YouTube channel. We invited public comment on our initial drafts before finalizing each document by live vote. The government then posted the final versions, along with other competition documents, on its competition page. Our rules and procedures were modeled on those of other selection commissions but also followed the requirements of the Customs Code.

 In December 2025, the international commissioners traveled to Kyiv and joined our Ukrainian counterparts to promote the competition, solicit input, and ask Ukraine’s NGO community to help publicize the competition and provide background information on applicants’ integrity. We also reached a formal agreement with NABU to help prepare information on the final group of applicants for our integrity checks.

Forty-two candidates applied, most of them from the SCS. The Customs Code required that the field be narrowed through a cognitive ability test, a test of legislative knowledge, and practical case exercises on customs practice, economics, and leadership. Some commissioners also used a personality test, though it was not formally or publicly scored. The Ukrainian commissioners oversaw the exams, and the full commission validated the results at each stage. By March 2026, 15 candidates remained for final interviews and integrity checks.

The integrity check

The integrity check is the heart of the selection process and arguably the commissioners’ most important tool, particularly for the international commissioners, in identifying candidates whose ethics or integrity are in question. Under the Customs Code, every candidate who reached the interview stage underwent formal “special vetting” by Ukraine’s security and law enforcement agencies. In addition, the commission conducted its own review of each interviewee’s integrity, drawing on input from NGOs and other open sources, on NABU’s research using its access to a range of closed registries, and on research by our secretariat’s lawyers. Candidates were given a set of specific questions and the opportunity to clarify any integrity issues the secretariat had surfaced. Our role as commissioners was to oversee this process, educate ourselves on any issues that remained unclear, and raise them in the interviews.

Civil society organizations and investigative journalists were our most active allies. They began investigating candidates as soon as we admitted the initial pool of 42 applicants and produced a steady stream of revealing stories on websites and YouTube channels, highlighting discrepancies between applicants’ earnings and their assets, chiefly cars and real estate. In a few cases, they publicly confronted candidates arriving at or leaving the selection exams. We also learned that a surprising number of Ukrainians have remarkably generous in-laws! While we accepted information from any source, we worked carefully with the secretariat to verify it and to give candidates the chance to clarify or explain anything that remained unclear.

By law and in practice, selection commissions do not determine whether a candidate is “corrupt” in a legal sense; we were not equipped to make that judgment. Instead, as the Customs Code instructs, we reviewed each candidate’s integrity dossier to determine whether we had a “reasonable doubt” about the candidate’s integrity. Each commissioner had to identify their own doubts about a candidate before we held a formal vote.

Voting

We conducted 15 interviews over four days, in person in Kyiv and broadcast live. The interviews focused on candidates’ integrity and competence. For each candidate a Ukrainian and an international commissioner teamed up to ask the integrity questions. To make the interviews as objective and fair as possible, we used expert-designed scenarios to assess each candidate’s leadership and decision-making skills. After the interviews, we set aside a day and a half for internal deliberations and to agree on our public voting process.

The voting rules in the Customs Code defined how much influence the international commissioners could have. The Code requires four votes for any commission decision, at least two of which must come from international commissioners. If a decision falls short of four votes, a re-vote may be held within 24 hours. After that, a decision may be taken with three votes, provided two of them come from international commissioners. In this way, the international experts play a “decisive role”: the commission could not take any decision without the agreement of at least two of us. Ukraine’s NGOs and the international community fought for this decisive role in the law establishing the High Anti-Corruption Court and have continued to push for it in each subsequent law creating an international selection commission.

In the end, our commission reached its decision with four votes in favor: all three international commissioners and one Ukrainian commissioner voted for each of the two finalists, while the other two Ukrainian commissioners abstained. We used an elimination voting procedure, which we hoped would let the public see how each commissioner assessed each candidate. Over seven rounds of voting, we narrowed the field of 15 to two, with Damentsov and Mandziy each receiving four votes.

Lessons for the future of international selection commissions

I believe our commission’s success came down to the collegial atmosphere established by our chair and to each member’s willingness to make room for the views and concerns of the other commissioners. Future international experts should be chosen for their ability to work across cultures and amid diverse views, and future commissions should work to build a similarly respectful atmosphere.

The secretariat also played a critical role in our success. The resources needed to stand up and staff a secretariat and to support international experts in future selection processes are substantial and should not be underestimated. International donors will need to stay fully engaged for future international selection commissions to succeed.

As I noted at the outset, our commission was required to recommend two finalists to the Finance Minister, a bar many of us doubted we could clear once interviews began. (Had we failed to find two, the Customs Code would have required us to restart the competition.) We did meet that bar, but I believe international selection commissions work best when they are required to identify only one candidate, or at most “up to two,” which at least gives them some flexibility. Requiring more than one candidate can defeat the very purpose of inserting internationals into the process: identifying someone of the highest integrity.

While I firmly believe in the value of international selection commissions as a tool for beginning to address systemic institutional corruption, at some point Ukraine, and any other country that adopts this tool, will need to take full control in selecting the heads of government agencies, prosecutors, and judges. Laws establishing these commissions should therefore include a sunset provision under which selection reverts to a fully domestic process at a set point. The Customs Code contains such a provision, as do a few of the other laws establishing international selection commissions: amendments eliminating the role of international experts for the SCS selection are to be submitted within six years, and adopted within eight years of the Code’s enactment. We should expect that the Ukrainian government will eventually regain enough of its citizens’ trust to identify and appoint accountable leaders of high integrity on its own.

The hard work of cleaning up the corruption that has plagued Ukraine’s State Customs Service can now begin under new, accountable leadership. If we believe leadership matters in the fight against corruption, international selection commissions can be a critical tool for identifying and vetting leaders of integrity while rebuilding public trust in how those leaders are chosen.