Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine #867 of July 1, 2026
Who is affected: people with disabilities; employers, labor integration and sheltered employment enterprises; educational institutions and social service providers; the Fund for Social Protection of Persons with Disabilities, the National Social Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Social Policy, Family and Unity of Ukraine.
Summary:
- defines the mechanism for distributing and using the funds of the state fund for the social protection of people with disabilities: it is formed primarily from the contributions of employers who fail to comply with the employment quota and from sanctions for non-compliance;
- establishes funding priorities in the event of a shortage of funds:
- training and retraining of people with disabilities;
- cybersecurity training for people with Group I and II disabilities under a separate experimental project;
- administrative support of the fund itself;
- compensation to employers and subsidies;
- expands the range of entities eligible for compensation: alongside employers and labor integration enterprises for people with disabilities, it now includes social service providers and educational entities in the field of non-formal education;
- establishes quarterly reporting by recipients to the fund’s territorial branches and consolidated quarterly reporting by the fund to the Ministry of Social Policy and the National Social Service;
- assigns oversight of the earmarked use of funds to the National Social Service, and oversight of the performance of contracts with social service providers to the fund’s own territorial branches.
What is right:
Prioritizing expenditures in the event of insufficient funds is a well-founded approach. Giving priority to financing the training and professional retraining of people with disabilities over compensation to employers corresponds to the logic of the earmarked use of the Fund’s resources, under which priority funding is directed at supporting people with disabilities themselves.
Including social service providers and non-formal education entities among the recipients expands the toolkit of support: a person with a disability can receive not only employment assistance, but also social services and education, financed from a single source.
The provision on retaining unused funds to cover expenditures in the following budget year is important, as it protects against a situation in which balances are automatically returned to the general budget and the fund loses its accumulated resource.
What is wrong:
The procedure does not define maximum shares for the distribution of funds between areas, which makes the actual distribution entirely dependent on the discretion of the Ministry of Social Policy and the fund’s proposals, without any benchmarks.
Alternative solution:
It would be advisable to provide for public reporting not only within the system but also externally, at least in the form of an annual public report by the fund with a breakdown of expenditures by area and results, accessible to people with disabilities and their organizations.
What happened:
The resolution is a bylaw that operationalizes the mechanism for managing a fund whose resources are formed precisely from violations of the quota — that is, the more employers ignore the quota, the more funds potentially flow into the fund. This paradoxical logic has existed for a long time, and the procedure does not eliminate it.
In circumstances where the double counting mechanism is being introduced as an incentive for employers at the same time as oversight through the State Labor Service is being strengthened, the volume of revenues to the Fund may either grow or shrink.
The real effectiveness of the fund will be determined not so much by the procedures for distributing funds as by the extent to which they are transformed into real services, professional training, and opportunities for people with disabilities, rather than being directed primarily at sustaining the functioning of the system itself.