ACTS solutions

Mobilizing data and technology to help governments accelerate transparency.

Procurement

Enhancing transparency of government spending.

How can advanced technology help public procurement?

Governments work with vast amounts of data, and making sense of it all can be difficult. Governments are expected to execute the procurement process efficiently while upholding high standards of conduct that help ensure top-quality service delivery and protect public interest.
Governments can use advanced technology to better leverage historical data with models that can serve as a frame of reference for what they have historically paid for goods and services. This creates the ability to identify bids that fall outside that range.
Technology can also do more to help governments understand who they are transacting with and who stands to benefit from those transactions.

Why is transparency important in public procurement?

Government-funded projects, such as road repair, utilities, or construction, often prove complex and costly. As a result, they demand meticulous management.
A lack of transparency in public procurement can hinder the identification of warning signs that signal potential financial mismanagement, or the misuse of funds allocated for public programs. It can also hinder fair competition for government contracts.
Transparency is one of the most effective means to deter corruption, improve accountability, and foster public trust in governmental institutions.

How can ACTS help improve public procurement transparency?

ACTS collaborates with our Microsoft partners across the globe to assist governments in creating tailored solutions that enhance spending transparency.
These solutions incorporate advanced technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to help government agencies quickly sort and efficiently comb through vast amounts of data, identifying potential issues that may require further investigation.
Our public procurement rests on two key principles: the responsible application of advanced technology and fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors.

Beneficial ownership

Who are beneficial owners and why knowing them matters.

What does beneficial ownership in the public sector mean?

Beneficial ownership refers to people who stand to gain the most from a potential transaction.
Beneficial owners work with governments every day as suppliers and contractors. To prevent corruption in these transactions, governments need more transparency.
That can be hard, especially when those with bad intentions try to hide or obscure the nature of their relationships from government officials or entities.

How does ACTS help improve government visibility into beneficial ownership?

We believe the best way to ensure transparency and integrity in government interactions is to use technology to proactively identify and reduce corruption risks.
With ACTS, governments can now collect, connect, and analyze a wide spectrum of data sources about the businesses they deal with.
Data is visualized as risk signals in dashboards that flag potential instances where additional investigation is needed.

How does beneficial ownership information help governments?

It enables them to understand how a business behaves—where and how they transact, who they associate and compete with, and how they operate over time.
This helps reveal and unravel coordinated activities, questionable behavior, and structural influence.
By mobilizing data and technology, governments are empowered to be more efficient and effective at spotting suspicious patterns that warrant further investigation.

Beneficial ownership explained

Technology hasn’t kept pace with efforts to obscure beneficial ownership. That’s important because maintaining open and transparent government relies on knowing who benefits from owning companies that contract with government agencies.

Watch the video at right to learn more

Tax

How transparency can empower tax administrators to be more effective and efficient.

How does advanced technology help tax?

Tax generates important revenue intended for social services, public projects, transportation, utilities, and other services.
As data proliferates, manual processes to track payments and identify discrepancies cannot keep up.
With advanced technology like AI and machine learning, governments can now use the power of the cloud to monitor revenue and payments automatically. This provides better insights into proper payments, by whom, and for what purpose.
By reducing repetitive and tedious tasks, tax administrators can save time, reduce errors, and focus on more complex work that helps their communities thrive.

Why is transparency important to tax?

A lack of transparency can lead to tax evasion by individuals and businesses, resulting in less revenue for projects, infrastructure, and services that citizens rely on.
Advanced technologies empower tax administrators to be more effective and efficient at identifying irregularities that may warrant further investigation or audit.
Transparency builds trust with citizens, helping them see how their government collects and utilizes tax-generated income within their community.

How can ACTS help improve tax?

ACTS works with Microsoft Partners worldwide to design scalable, accurate tax solutions.
Our customized solutions fit the needs of governments, helping them improve transparency, integrity, and opportunities to better serve their citizens.
Intuitive, actionable dashboards help users sort through the data to reveal major government KPIs—like income versus debt, anticipated revenues versus actuals, and collections of types of tax—to better focus their analysis.

Investigations

Maintaining compliance and codes of behavior.

What areas in the public sector require the most investigations?

More than half of all government investigations pertain to spending. Common topics include project budgetary spend, cost overages, contract bids, and general corruption.
Traditionally, investigations have been reactive by nature, a response triggered by suspicious practices that come to light that may indicate unlawful profiteering or beneficial advantages.
Auditors conduct another type of government investigation. They monitor government actions to ensure that agencies pursue proper legal channels and adhere to standards of conduct mandated by law. This can be financial or regulatory. Their work can be in response to uncovered risks or merely procedural, such as tracking actions in relation to compliance.
Sometimes auditors collaborate with investigators in their pursuit of potential corruption.

How does ACTS help governments conduct investigations?

ACTS incorporates modern Microsoft technology, such as responsible AI and machine learning, to simplify the investigative process and improve results.
Governments can use AI to automate manual processes and monitoring, saving investigators valuable time and cost while providing more accuracy. These methods can also be applied to accumulate and analyze data, creating a traceable path supporting an investigation’s results.
AI creates new opportunities for governments to proactively prevent illegal spending, overages, and general corruption.
AI also enables investigators to be more efficient and effective with their resources, from reviewing invoices to obtaining proof of execution. The technology would alert the proper authorities concerning any risk signals in near real time.

How does modern technology support traditional investigations?

Technology only goes so far in an investigation. Its primary purpose is to help spotlight potential indicators of corruption or illegal acts, which it can do faster and more accurately than manual analysis alone. The results empower users to decide whether an issue warrants further investigation and what, if any, actions to take.
ACTS technology solutions are built to help governments accelerate operational transparency. We customize our algorithms to help address government’s unique challenges and proactively identify irregularities or behavior outside the norm.