Argentina's Anti-Corruption Office and Fundación Sadosky Build an AI Tool to Map Conflicts of Interest

In July 2022, Argentina's Oficina Anticorrupción (Anti-Corruption Office, within the Ministry of Justice) signed an agreement with Fundación Sadosky — the national public-interest foundation for data-science and AI research linked to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation — to jointly develop algorithms able to identify undisclosed links between people or entities holding private interests and people exercising public functions.
The tool is designed to draw on public information already produced by different state bodies, including the COMPR.AR and CONTRAT.AR national procurement platforms and the MapaInversiones public-works database, cross-referencing officials, their declared assets and interests, and contractors to generate early alerts on possible conflicts of interest. The teams — Fundación Sadosky's Data Science and AI area, working with the Anti-Corruption Office's Transparency Policy Planning Directorate — say they have prioritised the interpretability and explanatory capacity of the models over raw complexity, so that alerts can be understood and acted on by non-technical investigators.
By July 2023, a year into the collaboration, the project had produced an integrated database linking the public sources, a search tool for querying contractors' and officials' family and business connections, and a prototype risk calculator for public contracts — but officials describe this as only a first phase, noting that further government data still needs to be made available before the tool can move to the next stage. No public evaluation of the prototype's accuracy or of any conflicts of interest it has actually flagged has been published, and as of this review the tool has not been described as operationally deployed.

Read the full analysis: https://fundacionsadosky.org.ar/algoritmos-anticorrupcion-pcdia/

Read the full analysis: https://fundacionsadosky.org.ar/algoritmos-anticorrupcion-pcdia/