Detecting Fraud in Public Acquisition of Brazilian Government with an Analytical Approach.

In Brazil, government purchases of products or services, by constitutional and legal impositions, must be preceded by bidding, whose supervision is the responsibility of the Courts of Auditors. Bids are subject to numerous frauds, including collusion between bidders, which sometimes occur through the exclusive or majority participation of the same group of business partners. The transparency of government spending is a global trend and, in Brazil, there are several public databases of the Courts of Auditors on bidding procedures. The present study, using public data, aims to verify the degree of involvement/engagement among bidders. Our research resulted in the identification of 688 bids in which the same economic group represented 100% (one hundred percent) of the bidders, which constitutes a strong presumption of fraud. The adopted approach uses graph-based databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]