The Essence of the Concept of “Financial Monitoring” in the Context of Ensuring National Security

The article presents the results of an expert survey of Ukrainian enterprises to identify losses from economic crimes, fraud, and corruption. The scientific approaches to the definition of the concept of “financial monitoring” are analyzed and generalized, which are conditionally systematized into the following groups: system, set of measures, institute, tools, mechanism, security component, a form of financial control. It is established that financial monitoring is mostly understood as a system of legally established information, control, and law enforcement procedures; system of measures of financial, administrative, criminal, and operational-search nature; continuous monitoring system; a set of measures of the subjects of financial monitoring; institute of financial law; instrument of state regulation; economic and legal mechanism in the field of prevention and counteraction to legalization (laundering) of proceeds from crime; component of the system of economic security of the national economy; the specific form of state financial control; component of financial security of the state. On this basis, the author's approach to the interpretation of this economic category as a tool for national security is based on the implementation of a set of institutional, regulatory, organizational and economic, innovative, investment information measures. The study found that despite some positive legislative initiatives to establish and operate a financial monitoring system in Ukraine, there are still some problems of insufficiently effective regulatory support in this area. Most laws and regulations do not correspond to each other. Some of them are only about guaranteeing national security but do not prescribe general principles of financial monitoring as a tool to ensure national security. Appropriate institutional conditions for the development of a system for preventing and combating the legalization (laundering) of proceeds from crime have not been determined. Appropriate mechanisms for institutional, organizational, economic, financial, and information support for the functioning of the financial monitoring system from the standpoint of national security have not been developed. To solve these problems, the directions of improvement of normativelegal regulation of the development of the financial monitoring system in Ukraine are determined.