Information technologies for countering corruption: analysis of the Costa Rican public procurement system
Main Article Content
Abstract
Corruption has disastrous consequences for the well-being of societies. In particular, public procurement is a highly vulnerable factor due to the high value of its transactions. This research analyzes the role that information technologies can play in the fight against corruption. We developed a case based on open data on public procurement in Costa Rica to identify the main concepts associated with the underlying information system. The case shows the potential of technological tools for social network analysis to counter the complexity of corruption networks. It also shows the need for a rich ecosystem of anti-corruption data – preferably in an open format.
Downloads
Article Details
The Brazilian Journal of Public Administration (RAP) undertakes to contribute to the protection of authors’ intellectual rights. On this matter:
- It uses the Creative Commons BY (CC-BY) license for all texts it publishes, except when there is indication of specific holders of copyrights and property rights;
- It uses the similarity verification software of content - Plagiarism (Crossref Similarity Check);
- It takes actions to fight against plagiarism and ethical misconduct aligned with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Further information on the Code of Ethics adopted by RAP can be found in Ethical Standards and Code of Conduct.
References
Barabasi, A. L. (2016). Network science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General System Theory: Foundations, Development. New York, NY: George Braziller.
Byrne, E., Arnold, A. K., & Nagano, F. (2010). Building Public Support for Anti-Corruption Efforts: Why Anti-Corruption Agencies Need to Communicate and How. Washinghton, DC: UNODC, CommGAP, and The World Bank. Recuperado de https://www.unodc.org/documents/corruption/Publications/StAR/CorruptionWhitePaperpub31110screen.pdf
Diviák, T., Dijkstra, J. K. & Snijders, T. A. B. (2018). Structure, multiplexity, and centrality in a corruption network: the Czech Rath affair. Trends in Organized Crime, 22, 274-297. Recuperado de https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-018-9334-y
Gartner. (2019). 2020 CIO Agenda: Resilience During Disruption. Recuperado de https://www.gartner.com/en/publications/2020-cio-agenda
Luna-Pla, I., & Nicolás-Carlock, J. R. (2020). Corruption and complexity: a scientific framework for the analysis of corruption networks. Applied Network Science, 5(13), 1-18. Recuperado de https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-020-00258-2
Open Contracting Partnertship. (2020). Open Contracting Data Standard. Recuperado de https://standard.open-contracting.org/latest/en/
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2017). Government at a Glance - 2017 Edition. Recuperado de https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=GOV_2017
Sistema Integrado de Compras Públicas. (2022). Datos Abiertos Adjudicaciones. Recuperado de https://www.sicop.go.cr/index.jsp
Soylu, A., Elvesæter, B., Turk, P., Roman, D., Corcho, O., Simperi, E., … Lech, T. C. (2019). Towards an Ontology for Public Procurement Based on the Open Contracting Data Standard. In I. O. Pappas, P. Mikalef, Y. K. Dwivedi, L. Jaccheri, J. Krogstie, & M. Mäntymäki (Eds.), Digital Transformation for a Sustainable Society in the 21st Century. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 11701, pp. 230-237). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Recuperado de https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29374-1_19
Srivastava, S., & Singh, A. K. (2018). Graph Based Analysis of Panama Papers. In Proceedings of the 5º International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Grid Computing, Himachal Pradesh, India. Recuperado de https://doi.org/10.1109/PDGC.2018.8745785
Transparencia Internacional. (2020). Corruption Perception Index. Recuperado de https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/nzl
Van Erven, G. C. G., Holanda, M., & Carvalho, R. N. (2017). Detecting Evidence of Fraud in the Brazilian Government Using Graph Databases. In A. Rocha, A. Correia, H. Adeli, L. Reis, & S. Costanzo (Eds.), Recent Advances in Information Systems and Technologies (Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Vol. 570, pp. 464-473). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Recuperado de https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56538-5_47
Villedieu, J. (2016, enero 04). Exploring €1.3 trillion in public contracts with graph visualization. Linkurious. Recuperado de https://linkurious.com/blog/exploring-e1-3-trillion-in-public-contracts-with-graph-visualization/
Whitworth, B., & Ahmad, A. (2013). Socio-Technical System Design. In Interaction Design Foundation (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (Chap. 24, 2a ed.). Recuperado de https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/socio-technical-system-design
World Economic Forum. (2019). Quality of roads. Recuperado de https://reports.weforum.org/pdf/gci-2017-2018-scorecard/WEF_GCI_2017_2018_Scorecard_EOSQ057.pdf