Strategist and researcher with 22 years of experience in management, auditing, and consulting in more than 50 entities, professor at 26 universities and three research centers, with 52 publications, evaluator of 13 scientific journals, international speaker, and evaluator in Scopus and WoS journals, trained in institutions in Europe, USA, and Latin America, and professor of statistics in Carver University.

The fight against corruption is necessary and indispensable in several countries. Corruption has become so serious that we even have an index of corruption perceptions in each country (Corruption Perceptions Index), promoted by Transparency International (Alfaro, 2022a). When reviewing the legislation and the various actions of the different governments, it can be seen that these laws, regulations or actions are mainly reactive; that is, they mainly seek to establish sanctions after the damage has already occurred for each country or for the world in general and are not focused on prevention so that these cases do not occur or are detected early.

It must be recognized that corruption in public administration continues to occur in various forms despite the fact that several countries have very drastic sanctions. This situation calls for the systematic development of preventive actions on a much more frequent and comprehensive basis. It should also be remembered that there are transnational criminal organizations, which also have an impact on corruption in various countries, and that there is also a global terrorism index (Global Terrorism Index) [Alfaro, 2022b].

To prevent the development of acts of corruption, various actions have already been devised and implemented that have contributed to the alert participation of the population, the media, educational entities at various levels (regular basic education, undergraduate, master's or doctoral institutes and universities), as well as the participation of the various government entities of the various countries at different levels (national, regional or local) and in their various branches (executive, legislative, judicial and others as appropriate); however, these facts are discovered when the cases are already serious and scandalous. Therefore, the solution to the detection of corruption must have technological components that allow early detection.

Corrupt officials or public servants receive money from the persons who are participating in the act of corruption to favor themselves, usually through contracts for large amounts of money; therefore, those records of transactions that represent money destined for the officials or public servants should be detected in time. Therefore, suspicious transactions of corruption could be catalogued so that these transactions can be characterized, registered and then detected automatically and integrally through information systems in the various public entities such as tax offices, land registry offices and especially the prosecutor's offices and the judiciary. This will be explained through two cases in which at least the transactions should have been considered as suspicious.

A first case can be represented when a minister has a company and his company issues a consulting invoice to a company that is a current supplier of the State. This transaction is incompatible due to conflicts of interest, illegal and is typified in the legislations of several countries; but it is usually discovered after investigations that take months or years, when this information was already in the tax office since the issuance of the invoice by the supplier company. This transaction, at least suspicious of a crime, should have been immediately reported to the public prosecutor's office; however, this has not been the case because the legislations or the actions of the executive powers do not typify the implementation of this type of actions, which are easy to implement at a technological level.

A second case can be represented when a public servant or official or his or her direct or indirect relatives receive money for a bribe. Normally, what corrupt officials or public servants do is to spend the money on purchases of properties such as expensive cars, apartments, houses, shares in publicly traded companies, etc. It could be typified as a suspicious transaction that as soon as an official or public servant or their direct or indirect relatives buy a property that is not in accordance with their income or savings or that is not financed by a credit, this transaction should be reported to the prosecutor's office so that investigations can be initiated and then the respective complaints, since the asset imbalance is a clear indication of a crime.

Just as these cases have been typified, dozens or hundreds of cases could also be typified that would make it possible to prevent corruption crimes as soon as they are initiated, since bribes (especially in crimes involving millionaire purchases by the State) are not paid with a single payment, but are paid as the contract payments are made between the public entity and the supplier company. Finally, it should be reiterated that the technological implementation of these actions to detect cases of corruption early is very simple, since it requires little time and money and is not complex as a computer algorithm, so that the governments of the various countries could implement them comprehensively in the various branches of government, if they really have the political will to fight corruption or if the citizens of each country demand their implementation through the current channels of communication or through referendum.


References:

• Alfaro, E. A. (2022a). Understanding the Corruption Perceptions Index. In Modern Indices for International Economic Diplomacy (pp. 233-270). Springer International Publishing.
• Alfaro, E. A. (2022b). Understanding the Global Terrorism Index. In Modern indices for international economic diplomacy (pp. 271-294). Springer International Publishing.