Artificial Intelligence boosts productivity in the Federal Court of Accounts
The Federal Court of Accounts makes use of artificial intelligence as a reading tool for hundreds of daily-published calls of tender for purchase of goods and services by the federal public administration while identifying signs of irregularities in contracts.
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Since the beginning of 2017, the Federal Court of Accounts has worked with the robot Alice, whose acronym explains its function: Analysis of Public Tenders and Calls of Tender. Its objective is to undertake the heavy work, detailed reading of public calls of tender and minutes of record of prices published by the federal administration, in addition to other public and state-level institutions. Auditors who receive daily calls from the system, by e-mail, of data that shows inconsistencies, will no longer provide this service. As a result, many cases of public tenders/calls that infringed current regulations were canceled or had to be relaunched.
This step represents a stride towards public resource optimization in order to speed up data gathering for the identification of irregularities in public tenders.
Apart from this robot, the Court relies on two other robots: Sofia and Monica. The first (Auditor’s Guidance System on Facts and Evidence) is responsible for checking if any detail was left out of the text produced by the auditor and notifying him of any relevant information. Besides, the robot performs crosschecks on information such as the National Registry of Legal Entities (CNPJ), case number and the Individual Taxpayer Registration Number (CPF). It also indicates if any of the names mentioned in the case is of a deceased person.
The second robot (Integrated Monitoring for Acquisition Control), features a table showing all public purchases, even those unnoticed by Alice, such as direct contracts and those unenforceable.
The three robots are part of Labcontas (Control Information Laboratory), which combines 77 databases. Currently, this permits collecting all sorts of information, such as the registry of government accounts, list of public policies, a company’s shareholding structure, contracts using public funds, and public employees prosecuted by control instances.
Other institutions that already make use of the robots are the General Comptroller’s Office, Federal Prosecutor’s Office, Federal Police and State-level Courts of Accounts.