Review of Public Procurement Fraud Detection Techniques Powered by Emerging Technologies

Numerous studies and various methods have been used to detect and prevent corruption in public procurement. With the development of IT technology and thus the digitization of the Public Procurement Process (PPP), the amount of available data is increasing. Studies have shown progress in this area and have revealed many challenges and open issues geared to the various goals outlined in this paper. Different data mining and business intelligence techniques and methods are being used to develop models that will find any suspicious public procurement process, contracts, economic operators, or to classify observations as corrupt. In addition to using classification models, methods such as association rules and graph databases are used to find relationships between economic operators and contracting authorities, as well as to find daughter companies that participate in PPP collusion. Therefore, this paper addresses a comprehensive review of the emerging techniques and models used for the detection of suspicious or corrupted observations, their goals, open issues, challenges, methods and metrics used, tools, and relevant data sources. The findings show that models are mostly fitted on historical data and move in the direction of an early warning system. Moreover, the efficiency of fraud or anomaly detection depends on data set quality and detection of the most important red flags. The study is presenting a summary of identified fraud detection model objectives such as predicting fraud risk in contracts and contractors or finding split purchases, and detection of used data sources such as public procurement process or economic operator data.

@article{Modrušan2021,
  title     = {Review of Public Procurement Fraud Detection Techniques Powered by Emerging Technologies},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {2},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Nikola Modrušan and Kornelije Rabuzin and Leo Mršic},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120272},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120272}
}