TURYAGYENDA’S THOUGHTS ABOUT UGANDA’S CORRUPTION
In the bid to tackle corruption, hereby defined as “the abuse of power for private gain”, corrupt acts have to be detected and prosecuted and offenders have to be punished and deprived of their illicit proceeds.
At the same time, opportunities for corrupt practices have to be reduced and potential conflicts of interest have to be prevented through transparent and accountable administrative structures at legislative, executive and judicial level as well as in the private sector.
Comprehensive integrity-enhancing strategies, exchange of best practices and institutional safeguards should ensure that decisions in the public sector are solely taken in the public interest. In the case of Uganda It is almost impossible to draw valid conclusions on the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures and programs as it is almost impossible to empirically measure the scale of corruption in public procurement precisely.
Public procurement is one of the key means by which public money is spent. Public procurement is the process by which governments and regional and local public authorities or bodies governed by public law purchase products, services and public works. Public procurement is estimated to account for 22 % of gross domestic product (GDP) and 29% of general government expenditure in Uganda. This money is spent by a very large and heterogeneous population of public authorities – with many contracting authorities managing procurement budgets of different sizes and possessing very different administrative capacities.
Competition is considerable in this sphere .Each public tender is estimated to receive on average 5.4 offers. This implies that there is a substantial incentive for businesses to win public tenders and one could reason that this could lead – for some potential bidders – to look for means to by-pass public procurement rules or to influence the final decision: by means of bribery or other appearances of corruption for instance.
Public procurement constitutes an important market for the private sector and may influence the structure of a country’s economy. Its effects are highly visible to citizens and it plays an important role in determining their level of trust in the government. However, this is an area in which risks of misspending and corruption are high.
Corruption is in itself a vast subject, as it can occur at different levels of government, involve a variety of sectors and actors and take many forms. The context of prevention, detection and investigation of corruption in public procurement can be described as fragmented, as the many different actors involved with a variety of objectives lack a comprehensive view of the problem, let alone an integrated approach of prevention, detection and investigation of corruption. Contracting authorities may take multiple aspects into account besides value for money or cost reduction through optimal competition.
In Uganda data and information on the procurement processes are collected and analyzed by a myriad of institutions. Their systems are developed to facilitate, monitor and control public procurement – but not to prevent or detect corruption. Moreover, procurement systems and databases are manifold and differ in the selection, quantity and quality of data, as well as in accessibility.
Public audits focus on irregularities in the public procurement process, not on the necessity or the performance of projects for which services, goods or works are procured. When fraud and corruption are suspected, the cases are transferred to investigative bodies and are no longer the competence of the audit authorities.
Investigative bodies that fight corruption have in almost all instances to deal with a broad variety of corruption, and corruption in public procurement is but one aspect of their task. In Uganda there is no dedicated authority for investigations of corruption in public procurement alone.
Public procurement stakeholders should be aware of all corruption risks, and they should promote and preserve the integrity of the public procurement system in all stages of the procurement cycle, from procurement planning through awarding of the contract to contract management. Integrity, which refers to the consistent application of values, principles and norms, is a cornerstone of good governance and is critical for maintaining trust in government. Therefore, a coherent and comprehensive integrity system should form the basis for any effort to curb corruption in public procurement.
Some of the red flags /indicators that signal a higher probability that a procured product, service or work is corrupt are:
- Strong inertia in composition of evaluation team;
- Multiple contact points;
- Contact office not subordinated to tender provider;
- Contact person not employed by tender provider;
- Shortened time span for bidding process;
- Accelerated tender;
- Tender exceptionally large;
- Complaints from non-winning bidders;
- Award contract has new bid specifications;
- Substantial changes in project scope/price after award;
- Connections between bidders;
- All bids higher than projected overall costs;
- Award contract and selection documents not public;
- Awarding authority not filled in all fields in Tender Evaluation Document (TED) and other missing information.
The professionalism of the staff involved in making decisions related to public procurement procedures is also essential for good management, prevention of misconduct, compliance and monitoring. Officials need technical expertise to carry out internal evaluations. Staff training on various aspects of the public procurement cycle and recognition of procurement as a profession can help raise awareness on, and commitment to, good practices and integrity.
In this age of big data, we all leave behind individual information footprints, resulting in an abundance of data, allowing human and societal behavior to be objectively quantified and, therefore, easily tracked, modelled and, to a certain extent, predicted.
However, in Uganda one would be hard pressed to find statistical information regarding the most important characteristics of the national public procurement system, including the size of the national public procurement market. There is no designated institution for collecting this information, or more generally for the function of policy making regarding the public procurement system. In order to cartel corruption in the public procurement system relevant data needs to be collected whether it is to analyze the data for anomalies or to be presented as evidence in the courts of law for prosecution of offenders.
One of the Agencies such Uganda Bureau of Statistics should be mandated with collecting procurement data from all districts, government agencies, ministries down to local governments. UBOS should also be mandated to aggregate various systems with public procurement data and these systems should be standardized and restructured for data storage, enabling computerized corruption detection and prevention based on the data stored in local and central databases which are interlinked.
The procedures for collection and management of procurement data also needs to be standardized in order to achieve this goal. This should be done using a Web portal (Direct Data Entry in to the database), excel sheets uploaded to the web portal. Later the information can be verified for correctness. This in itself will act as a deterrent as the penalties for providing wrong information are already stipulated in the Laws of the land.
The extent to which corruption cases have been prosecuted is not entirely clear, not least because prosecution in such cases is based primarily on other types of crime, such as fraud and bribery. As part of preliminary investigations in cases of corruption and other crimes, the IGG can take steps to track e-mails and tap phone lines. Criminal liability in public procurement cases is not limited to the executive level; ministers, for example, would have their immunity removed by parliamentary decision.
There is a notion in the country that only the big fish face crime proceedings in corruption cases and many are acquitted because of lack of evidence. All the focus in the fight against corruption has been put in all the other areas other than stream lining channels and gathering of information incidental to prosecution of offenders or important in identifying high risk projects and programs where money is likely to be stolen and implement tighter controls and monitor closely the progress of such projects and programs.
A comprehensive whistle-blower system needs to be implemented as a key weapon in the fight against corruption and fraud. The Government should not just allow staff to blow the whistle if they encounter serious irregularities; it should oblige them to do so. Guidelines should be given to staff on when and how to blow the whistle as well as reassurances that they will be protected and remain anonymous if they wish.
Concerning the whistle-blower system, the lack of a real program for the protection of witnesses and the absence of specific sanctions in case of non-denunciation are among the most prominent reasons for the non-effectiveness of such a system.
Disincentives also arise when no reward scheme exists for informants that decide to collaborate and denounce illegal behaviors. What is more, the obligation of denunciation can be in conflict with other obligations of public agents: rules of administrative moral code, professional secrecy, conflict with the hierarchy principle and even when such a sanction is foreseen, in practice complicity by abstention is often not repressed.
The effectiveness of a whistle-blower system can be also hindered by the limited social acceptance and low esteem given to whistle-blowers. Whistle-blowers are sometimes associated with common informers and their activities can be considered wrong or at least undesirable for the rest of the society. This phenomenon often characterizes societies where petty corruption and grease payments are socially accepted.
Above all, this ‘silent’ acceptance for bribery hinders effective fight with corruption, as it affects the morale and ethics of whole societies.
For the whistle-blower system to be effective the above concerns need to be addressed more specifically a reward mechanism where the reward given to whistle-blowers is quantified in monetary terms and clearly communicated to the public.
New technological opportunities hold enormous promise for empowering citizens to flag suspicious activity and providing good actors in government with the tools to detect, punish, and prevent corrupt or malicious activity.
Manual government transactions, face-to-face interactions, and the lack of standardized processes mean that transactions are vulnerable to dishonest behavior. While this is true for everyday government transactions by citizens, such as the solicitation of documents, it is magnified in processes of public procurement, where the potential for large illicit gains is greater. The more transactions take place digitally—through portals that are regulated by standards and constraints, and can be monitored—the more information on public contracting processes can be made public and tracked.
This will help in maintaining good practices on public procurement due to this development of and adherence to online transparency guidelines, which mostly involve posting as much information on the tendering process as possible online and exchanging all documents electronically.
This levels the playing field both by ensuring that everyone has the same information at once, and by giving public officials less discretionary personal influence over the process. The publication of this information in open data format can allow civil society and other assigned monitors to play a leading role in identifying and denouncing corruption, especially in cases where government does not have the resources or political will to go after corrupt actors.
Effective detection and prevention of corruption in public procurement is possible if the administrative data on tenders, bidders, projects and contractors are collected and stored in a structured way, accessible for controls, investigations and analysis. Such as:
◦ Needs assessments of the projects;
◦ Breakdown of the main components of a project with, where available, a statement on standard prices per component;
◦ Information on the bids received (number of bids, names of companies involved etc.);
◦ Number and reasons of bids terminated;
◦ Key outputs offered in the winning proposals;
◦ Detailed information on contract modifications;
◦ Monitoring and evaluation reports of the projects;
◦ Detailed information on the companies the state has contracted (e.g. ownership, number and value of contracts won etc.); and
◦ An overview of the companies blacklisted (due to e.g. corruption).
These structured databases could allow ex-ante monitoring and ex-post analysis of indicators of corruption (‘red flags’). New data mining techniques can be used to detect anomalies in the data that perhaps point at potential cases of fraud or even corruption. Moreover, based on the comprehensive methodology to measure the costs of corruption in public procurement these databases can also enable a more detailed analysis of not only the probability of corruption, but also a more accurate estimate of the costs of corruption.
Beyond simply publishing procurement data in open E-procurement cannot be left alone, however; it must be accompanied by regular audits and oversight by responsible agencies to prevent irregularities. This can be supported by Integrity Pacts , which are effectively agreements between government agencies offering the contract and the companies bidding for it that they will not engage in corrupt practices for the extent of the contract, and which are overseen by civil society groups (such as Transparency International).
The power of Smartphone technology has been utilized by citizens to raise awareness of and call to account police misconduct in the United States and Brazil, as well as expose misused public funds in Haiti Coupled with the disseminating power of social media, it has become a means to gather evidence of illegality and use it to demand political and judicial redress. Civil society in Uganda should support and encourage the development of Civic Tech applications that aim to provide citizens with the information and means to hold authorities accountable, freely available on platforms such as apps4citizens .
Civic tech applications can enhance public procurement oversight by allowing citizens to track the progress of public works on the ground or report bribe-taking by public officials. For example, Promise Tracker in Brazil encouraged young Brazilians to use their smartphones to report deficiencies in public infrastructure and government services, such as in maintenance of bus stations, handicap accessibility of parks, quality of school lunches, and the like. Promise Tracker’s citizen monitoring projects have produced interventions by relevant authorities and a resulting improvement in some cases.
I am developing an app that will allow Ugandans to take smartphone videos to report infrastructural or urban problems in their town, including but not limited to: illegal parking, overflowing rubbish bins, accidents, and police taking bribes for more efficient treatment by managing authorities. This monitoring will produce timely intervention by the appropriate authorities, but in general will work to foster a culture of community responsibility and an expectation that government will work to strengthen accountability. I have approached various government authorities for financial support to complete and implement this project in vain for the last 2 years.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as Blockchain can be hackproof methods for “the verification of identity, the registry of assets, and the certification of transactions” in public contracting. These technologies are best suited for scenarios where the data itself is public, but there are questions about the trustworthiness of entities responsible for updating the data. DLTs democratize the verification process for transactions and distribute the data management responsibilities for a series of transactions across multiple participants, all of whom have access to a data chain that is unbreakable due to the application of cryptographic math that will flag attempted tampering, and all of which have real incentives to identify irregularities
Widespread risk assessment is often beyond the capacity of manual analysis: there are often far too many datasets and variables for even experienced data analysts. In this respect, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms—such as the European Commission’s Arachne tool and South Korea’s Bid Rigging Indicator Analysis System (BRIAS)—can be critical in identifying irregularities in public contracting processes and closely monitoring high-risk projects.
The Arachne tool utilizes internal databases—e.g. of contracts, beneficiaries, and expenses—taken from a national managing authority, and external databases—e.g. of shareholders, subsidiaries and representatives of companies; politically exposed persons; blacklisted companies lists; enforcement lists—comprised of hundreds of millions of names and cross-references with the aim of detecting high-risk projects. Meanwhile, BRIAS was developed to “identify cartel activity and potential cases of bid rigging in public procurement” and draws information from KONEPS—South Korea’s e-procurement system—to look for anomalies in factors of public contracting processes, including price and number of bidders in order to produce an overall potential bid-rigging score that, if above a certain threshold, could be the basis for opening an investigation.
Other data mining and analytics tools can, by taking large open datasets and thoughtfully cross-referencing, also be useful in identifying risky transactions. With these tools, risk maps can be developed that shed light on illicit financial flows and sophisticated networks of corruption
I am also working with a team of experts to develop an AI algorithm what will be able to detect and predict anomalies in the Public procurement systems of developing countries based on red flags/indictors in high risk projects. The system will be able to predict corruption tendencies up to 3 years in advance on any given project and geographical area and based on the results, suggest possible effective interventions to mitigate the risks of losing money using (Generic Neural Elastic Search) a cloud-native semantic search solution based on deep neural network.
It enables large-scale index and semantic search of text-to-text, image-to-image, video-to-video, and any-to-any content form and artificial Neural Networks. We are so far using datasets from Venezuela, Malawi and Bangladesh. The accuracy levels of the system are at 87.35% but with more data available to us in future to train it. We hope to hit 97.32% accuracy from our projections by 2022.I would love to pilot the project in Uganda but I have not got the best response from the authorities that be.
In conclusion although coordination and supervision of public contracts is often assigned to designated public authorities, these bodies tend not to focus specifically on detecting corruption. Incidents of fraud and corruption are regularly detected by Auditor Generals office through the audits on procurement, even though auditors are not necessarily geared towards the detection of corruption either.
The fight against corruption is however not only carried out by formal public institutions, but increasingly so by informal networks, such as NGOs, press and citizens. Especially in a context of high unemployment, scarce public resources and fiscal austerity, citizens and businesses alike appear to be less and less tolerant vis-à-vis fraud, money laundering and corruption. Such a change in attitude has at least three major consequences.
Firstly, decision-makers are under increasing pressure to ensure transparency and reinforce, update and coordinate the national and international anti-corruption agendas. Secondly, private and civil actors are increasingly detecting corruption and denouncing corrupt behavior to the competent authorities. This trend will supported by the creation of whistle-blower systems and protection programs, which represent a real incentive to share and denounce illegal behavior, both in private companies and in public institutions.
This needs to also be supported by political will, free and properly resourced press, and active social media networks. Thirdly, these societal trends and in particular the rise of social media networks provides new opportunities for formal investigators as well, who see an increase in the amount of leads and data to be pursued.
Government needs to support technological innovations (Artificial Intelligence) that will help in the collection and analyzing public procurement data to be able to detect and prevent acts of corruption even before they happen. Next time I will talk about social innovation and how it can transform Uganda to a middle Income economy by 2040 ohh and a little about the techniques employed by public servants to steal government money and can’t even be detected by audits. For God And My Country.
Turyagyenda Timothy
Artificial Intelligence Consultant & computer science PHD candidate.
0750886041