Today at the session of the Government Committee there have been endorsed the bills, which envisage simplifying a procedure of selection of investment projects to be financed from the State Fund for Regional Development. This was announced by Vice Prime Minister/Minister of Regional Development, Construction, Housing and Utilities of Ukraine Hennadii Zubko at a briefing on Tuesday.

"Amendments to the Budget Code and the Law "On Fundamentals of State Regional Policy" were designed to simplify and improve the efficiency in use of money of taxpayers. We are talking about acceleration and more efficient use of the State Fund for Regional Development (SFRD)", informed Hennadii Zubko.

According to the Government official, the procedure of approval to redistribute SFRD funds for investment programs and regional development projects lasts up to 4 months. Accordingly, this reduces the time to implement them, while the funding process doesn’t commence from the year start, but in most cases in late III – early IV quarter of the year.

In 2015, there have been selected 877 projects. But due to the complex procedure of coordination, the use of funds for their implementation makes up about 60%.

Hennadii Zubko announced that the offered changes would cut the term of selection the projects to 20 days and reduce the selection procedure from 9 to 3 stages. In addition, the remaining SFRD funds from the planned amount can be used next year.

"Therefore, we would prevent economic losses from annual underinvestment of projects through reducing inflation losses by UAH 650 million approximately", added the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine.

According to him, the more functional procedure will provide an opportunity to promote the development of an online SFRD platform, where one can trace the selection, the passing and each stage of implementation of any investment project in various regions.