DIGintegrity: A toolkit to disrupt corruption through data-based technologies

This post is written by Camilo Cetina, CAF – Development Bank of Latin America.

• **The problem: **Across the globe, corruption is mutating into complex forms of organised crime.
• **Why it matters: **Corruption is rife and technology is making it easier for criminals to get ahead.
• **The solution: **Digital modernisation and effective governance are central to eradicating corruption.

The Lava Jato corruption scandal exposed several Brazilian government officers in 2016, including the then president of the Brazilian Chamber of Representatives, and further investigations have implicated other organisations in a way that reveals a worrying phenomenon worldwide: corruption is mutating into complex forms of organised crime.

Is a digital world aiding or abating corruption?

For corruption networks to thrive and predate public funds, they need to capture government officers. Furthermore, the progressive digitalisation of economies and telecommunications increases the potential of corruption networks to operate transnationally, which makes it easier for them to identify new cooperation mechanisms (for example, mobilising illicit cash through a church) and accumulate huge profits. This simultaneously increases their ability to reorganise and hide among huge amounts of data underlying the digital platforms used to mobilise money around the world.

Digital technologies have huge potential to improve public policies for the prevention, detection, and investigation of corruption phenomena.

However, at the same time, data-based technologies can significantly contribute as a response to the challenges revealed by recent corruption cases such as Lava Jato, Odebrecht, the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers. The new report DIGIntegrity, the executive summary of which was recently published by CAF – Development Bank of Latin America, highlights how anti-corruption policies can become more effective when they target specific datasets which then are reused through digital platforms to prevent, detect and investigate corruption networks.

The DIGintegrity report

The report explains how the growing digitalisation accompanied by the globalisation of the economy is having a twofold effect on governments’ integrity agendas. On the one hand, globalisation and technology provide unprecedented opportunities for corruption to grow, thus facilitating the concealment of illicit flows of money, and hindering jurisdictional capacities for detection and punishment. But, on the other hand, systemic improvements in governance and collective action are being achieved thanks to new technologies that help provide automated services and make public management processes more visible through open data and increasingly public records. There are ‘integrity dividends’ derived from the growing digitisation of governments and the increasingly intensive use of data intelligence to prevent corruption.

Source: DIGintegrity report

The DIGintegrity report aims to be a comprehensive toolkit for policymakers who want to implement digital innovations as part of their anti-corruption agenda. Although most of the evidence gathered by the report comes from specific experiences in Latin America; other examples from Estonia, Ukraine, the UK and USA are also explored.

Overall, digital technologies have huge potential to improve public policies for the prevention, detection, and investigation of corruption phenomena. The executive summary highlights that the adoption of digital technologies in public integrity can be structured in sequential order:

• First, open data infrastructure is essential. It is the cornerstone for implementing major digital innovations against corruption. For this aim, it is important that active transparency and open data policies are articulated with digital government policies to generate an ecosystem that guarantees the quality, validity, and reusability of datasets of special interest in terms of public integrity.

• Second, governments can leverage data intelligence techniques that make the tasks of preventing, detecting, and investigating acts of corruption more efficient. Optimal use of such technologies requires the development of a computationally-powerful infrastructure and a collaborative environment to share data. This, in turn, allows algorithmic decision-making processes to develop, identify, predict and prevent potential corruption issues by digesting diverse datasets. Governments can also adopt more sophisticated technologies like deep network analysis to speed up the investigation and prosecution of corruption cases.

• Third, once computing power is gained and digital infrastructure is improved throughout the public integrity ecosystem, it might be smart to move onto blockchain technology to prevent acts of corruption in public management processes that are especially vulnerable to integrity risks (e.g. public procurement, licensing, conditional cash transfers, among others). Although there is no systematic evidence yet that determines a proven effect of blockchain on corruption risks in public management, the available literature documents a growing use to ensure integrity within especially sensitive transactions using this technology.

• In addition, as digital technologies are integrated into public integrity policies, governments should incorporate risk management measures when adopting new technologies. Just as there are digital technologies for integrity, governments must ensure integrity in the use of technologies. The growing number of digital platforms outlined across the report with important anti-corruption applications are also exposed to criminal and misuse phenomena, which can undermine their potential in public integrity policies. For example, the abuse of public functions for activities such as trafficking of personal data or privileged tax information, money laundering, and data theft for identity fraud are risks that can potentially generate costs equivalent to corruption. Such risks need to be addressed for the public integrity agenda to succeed.

• Finally, an institutional environment must be created to ensure the long-term sustainability of the use of digital technologies. This implies, for example, making digital skills attainable in the public sector; improving public procurement of artificial intelligence; improving evidence-based decision-making processes across government agencies through sectoral data infrastructure, and deepening justice reforms in favour of a more restorative scheme that ensures the recovery of public money to compensate victims of corruption.

Governance is key too

Nevertheless, digital innovation, data-driven technologies, and big data computing power are not a ‘silver bullet’ to eradicate corruption. The institutional context and the governance framework framing aspects such as relations between the public sector and private firms, and between the government and civil society, are determinants for corruption networks to thrive. In this regard, fully exploiting the potential of digitalisation in public integrity policies demands government institutions to modernise themselves in two separate areas: institutional adjustments that promote integrity; and the adaptation of public authorities to the digital era.

The full DIGIntegrity report is now available in Spanish here; the English version will be published by July 2022.

_Note: Data & Policy is collaborating with the World Bank Global Governance Unit to publish a special collection of articles on the use of data analytics for anti-corruption. Follow us @data_and_policy on Twitter and sign up for eTOC alerts to stay alert to these publications, which are expected later in 2022. _

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