IMF's Anti-Corruption Challenge
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- IMF's Anti-Corruption Challenge
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Overview and objectives
- The IMF Anti-Corruption Challenge concluded with the final event at the 2021 Annual Meetings.
- The Challenge offered the Fund an opportunity to work closely with other international institutions, civil society, and the private sector on practical solutions to fight corruption.
- The IMF will continue engagement to find innovative solutions to improve governance and fight corruption following the conclusion of the Challenge.
Winning projects — progress, impact, and implementation
- Four challenge winners presented progress, impact, and learnings from implementing pilot projects over the past year.
- Project: Joining the Dots with Public Officials: Cross-Matching Beneficial Ownership and Financial Disclosures Data to Identify Red Flags
- Developing a dynamic tool capable of incorporating different datasets and integrating them into automated forms of data collection and learning programming logic (machine learning).
- System will identify new risks of corruption by using rules of analysis and patterns of red flags already detected and registered in the database’s historic records.
- Project: Public Procurement Corruption Risks: Harnessing Big Data for Better Fiscal Governance and Growth
- Team will deliver a dashboard covering 30+ countries similar in structure to the pilot dashboard.
- Team will prepare an expanded policy note or a working paper on the methodology and results.
- Project: Enhancing Transparency in Wage Bill Practices: Leveraging Blockchain
- Blockchain pilot in Guinea-Bissau led by the IMF in collaboration with Ernst and Young, the authorities, and UNDP.
- Will enable access to reliable and timely information on personnel and salaries to make better decisions, track effective outcomes, and help close gaps on inefficiencies identified in the wage bill.
- Project: Optimizing the Detection of Beneficial Ownership of High-Risk Firms in Brazil
- Creating a prototype tool for automating and optimizing detection of shell companies bidding in public procedures and their potential beneficial owners in Brazil.
Top 8 proposals and thematic focus areas
- Topic: Enhancing Governance in Public Finance: The Role of Data and Technology
- Harvesting open data for early detection of conflicts of interest in public procurement through cross-matching procurement, political party financing, and company ownership data; pilots in Estonia and Latvia with aim to expand.
- Corrupt Wage Bill Practices in Fragile States: Blockchain solution for Guinea-Bissau to obtain timely wage and employment data, strengthen payroll and auditing systems, and reduce excessive and opaque non-payroll payments.
- Topic: Tackling Corruption: Financial Disclosure Systems for Public Officials
- Joining the dots with PEPs: combining public officials’ financial disclosures with beneficial ownership data to generate red flags; pilot focuses on Colombia’s extractive sector.
- Public Officials Risk Index (PORI): develop an E-Filing system for financial disclosure, advanced data analytics for risk profiling, and a standardized risk framework to shift anti-corruption from reactive to preventive.
- Topic: Fighting Money Laundering: The Use of Data for Financial Intelligence
- Optimizing Money Laundering Investigations in Brazil Through Data Analytics: algorithms automatically build multi-level networks of criminal organizations, extract hundreds of money-laundering risk red flags, detect likely shell companies, and feed a Decision Support System (DSS) that automatically produces investigative reports.
- Topic: Improving the Understanding of Risks of Corruption
- Measuring Perceptions of Corruption through Gamification: use games or game-like elements to collect data on individuals’ responses to corrupt scenarios to inform public policy and compliance programs.
- Big-data intelligence tool to identify corruption risks in micro-level public procurement and estimate impact on prices; user-friendly portal allows policy-makers to explore policy scenarios and potential macro-level efficiency savings.
- Topic: Open Submission on Use of Open or Big Data for Governance and Fighting Corruption
- Rule-of-Law Foundations: Improving Access to Laws & Regulations — build a comprehensive online database of official versions of national laws and regulations that is free, reliably updated, and searchable to strengthen rule-of-law governance.
Event, judging, and program details
- Update November 2020: results announced; a replay of the IMF Anti-Corruption Challenge Pitch Event is available.
- Program elements:
- Moderator: Tristan Walker, Innovation Chief, IMF.
- Opening remarks by the Managing Director on the importance and impact of corruption and the Fund’s recent work on governance.
- Rhoda Weeks-Brown provided information on the challenge process and introduced judges.
- Each team presented a pre-recorded pitch video (5-minutes each) followed by live Q&A with judges.
- Judges included senior IMF directors, external academics, and representatives from CSOs and international partners, including:
- Jihad Azour; Vitor Gaspar; Ceyla Pazarbasioglu; Rhoda Weeks-Brown; Alejandro Werner; Sean Hagan; Warren Krafchick; Ed Olowo-Okere; Paul Maassen; Rosmarie Schlup; Mark Weber.
Sponsors, partners, and institutional support
- Organized by the IMF Innovation Lab (iLab) and Legal Department (LEG) in partnership with Fiscal Affairs, Finance, Strategy, Policy and Review, Institute for Capacity Development, and Communications departments.
- Sponsored by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).
- IBM Research served as a technical partner.
Policy implications and next steps
- Practical, data-driven tools developed through the Challenge aim to:
- Improve detection of corruption risks via cross-matching financial disclosure and beneficial ownership data.
- Enhance fiscal governance and procurement oversight using big-data analytics and dashboards covering 30+ countries.
- Improve wage bill transparency and payroll integrity using blockchain pilots in fragile states.
- Automate detection of shell companies and money-laundering networks to optimize investigative resources.
- The IMF will continue engagement with international institutions, civil society, and the private sector to scale successful pilots, produce expanded methodology notes or working papers, and integrate tools into policy dialogue and capacity development.
Content in this bundle
- ANTI-CORRUPTION CHALLENGE Pitch Event — World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings 2020
References