Towards Smart Citizen Control in Public Procurement: Ecuador's Case Study

Governments around the world carry out public procurement processes to pursue social-oriented goals and political beneficial outcomes. Profit-based objectives are not accounted for in public procurement, and this creates a natural environment for inefficiency and corruption. As a result, e-procurement tools have been implemented as part of government efforts to reduce corruption in both developed and developing countries. Yet, in the latter, e-procurement tools tend to lack effective prevention and control mechanisms. Particularly, in Ecuador -a middle income Latin American country- the government's official e-procurement system is devoid of automated mechanisms to detect and inform about corruption risks in purchasing procedures that take place within the platform. Unfortunately, according to past experiences reported in the literature, no existing e-procurement tool can be ported from or among countries. For this, we introduce a government independent tailored-made system that gathers data from the Ecuadorian official e-procurement website (SOCE), and analyzes its data to produce a set of indicators of corruption risks. Through a public web portal, the system will raise red flags upon detecting procedures where transparency, concurrency and legality principles are at risk. We believe that this tool will strengthen citizen control over public procurement in Ecuador and, in the near future, will allow us to integrate smart algorithms to automatically oversee public procurement in this country.