Design of Apps for Armchair Audit of Government Procurement Contracts

• In Event: SET Audit Analytics

Abstract

Each year, governments spend billions of dollars purchasing a wide variety of necessary goods and services to keep the government running. The governments must make sure that they spend money wisely and eliminate waste and abuse of dollars from taxpayer. Although government contracting system is supposed to be open and transparent, procurement fraud has become one of the most costly types of government fraud. There are a range of potential fraud schemes, such as bid rigging, bribery, kickbacks, defective pricing, product substation, etc. Recently, governments in some countries have started open data initiatives to make information about government operations more readily available and transparent to their citizens. However, although more open data on government contracts are available, there are few studies done that discuss how to make better use of this type of data and what data analytics tools can be applied. Therefore, this paper proposes a list of audit apps that can help professional auditors and citizens to analyze open government procurement data. These apps help investigate procurement data from different perspectives, such as validating contractor qualification, checking order changes, detecting defective pricing, etc. Then, several apps are shown as illustrations in this paper. The designed apps can be applied for open government data of different countries, and here in the paper Brazil federal government contracts data is used in the illustrations.

Authors

• Jun Dai, Rutgers University - Newark

• Qiao Li, Rutgers University - Camden

• Miklos A Vasarhelyi, Rutgers University - Newark