| dc.description.abstract | Procurement fraud remains an endemic in most modern economies. E-Procurement fraud may
manifest in different ways that can include collusion by parties involved in procurement as well
as falsification of documents. A procurement officer might be induced through bribery to favor a
particular supplier. For protection against procurement fraud, organizations have tried to
implement some control measures, hoping such measures would discourage the fraud that is
directed on institutions. Complex fraud does not revolve around the breaching of these controls,
but bypassing them. In this research we set out to design and implement an e-procurement fraud
detection tool for public entities using multi agent technologies. This was informed by
contributions from various government employees who were interviewed, literature review and
publications that indicate the presence of fraud in public offices attributable to procurement
processes. A prototype of an e-procurement system is developed with the complete procure-topay
functionality. This provides the environment for the agent based fraud detection tool to be
implemented on. Fraud is then detected using rule set to determine suspicious activities and
transactions in the e-procurement system. The agent based e-procurement fraud detection tool is
able to detect and report fraud in situations where inflation of unit cost of items at requisition
level and further upward adjustments are done while raising purchase orders. Upward adjustment
of quantities on purchase orders after requisition approval is also picked as fraud by the agent
detection tool. This is a scenario that requires approvals from approvers who may be
compromised or fail to take note of the discrepancies. The proceeds from such fraud may be paid
to the participants in the procurement chain as kickbacks (bribes). | en_US |
