Designing Audit Apps for Armchair Auditors to Analyze Government Procurement Contracts

Abstract

ABSTRACTEach year, governments around the world spend billions of dollars purchasing a wide variety of goods and services. These governments must spend their money wisely in order to eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer dollars. Although government contracting systems are supposed to be transparent, people may still take advantage of these systems to gain benefits, which leads to high-risk contracts and, sometimes, costly government frauds. Recently, governments in some countries have started open data initiatives in order to make government operations more transparent to their citizens. With the open data, a new type of auditor, called an armchair auditor, could play an important role in monitoring government spending. An armchair auditor could be anyone who has an interest in government expenditures and who usually uses technologies to perform analyses on open data. Few studies have discussed how armchair auditors can better use the open data and what data analytics tools could be applied. To that end, this paper proposes a list of audit apps that could assist armchair auditors in analyzing open government procurement data. These apps could help investigate procurement data from different perspectives, such as validating contractor qualification, detecting defective pricing, etc. This paper uses Brazilian federal government procurement contract data to illustrate the functionality of these apps; however, the apps could be applied to open government data in a variety of other nations.