Memory B Toolkit -- Computer aided Corruption Fighting
Memory B Toolkit is the technological Swiss Army Knife Prosecutors, Investigators and Government Inspectors around the world have as an ally for Corruption Fighting.
Introduction
Memory B was born out of the vision that corruption is a virulent disease which infects and spreads quickly through healthy tissues. As it happens on the immunological system (from which the name “Memory B” was borrowed), all corruption fighting initiatives should be promptly put to action and demand great effort and energy. The Memory B project was created to help to enhance the efficiency of the effort professionals devote to this noble and rewarding mission, using computational tools to filter gigantic data volumes and point out to Prosecutors, Investigators, Government Inspectors and Administrators which individuals and which transactions are indicatives of fraud.
From this filtering, these professionals may, for instance:
Direct their efforts to prove what Memory B tools are pointing out, elaborating a formal accusation to be presented to the justice;
Use Memory B’s preliminary reports as a justification to acquire further sensitive data, which might be feed back to the tools in order to generate deeper analysis;
Reveal new suspects connected with the investigated ones through obfuscated vicious relations, that might be eligible for plea bargains.
Memory B tools also help in pointing out inefficiencies, power abuses and possible misconducts for which culpability is hard or even impossible to prove, but, upon being evidenced or made public, it may:
Inhibit malicious practitioners in recidivism;
Serve as a basis or justification for the judicious redesign of government processes in order to minimize their occurrence;
Serve as support for the creation of new laws or administrative rules by setting limits or criminalizing such practices.
Finally, all Memory B’s tools and softwares aim to minimize the occurrence of practices or stratagems that circumvent the intended purpose of resources and prevent the infectious propagation of the notion that “Corruption Compensates”, present when there is no punishment for the guilty.
In addition to being used by government investigative agents or government officials, Memory B’s technologies and softwares are also available to ordinary citizens in countries where some of the recommendations of the “Transparency International” have been implemented, in particular the online and public release of administrative data. For this reason, there are Memory B modules designed to be used by well-intentioned institutions that wish to publish their administrative data in an online and secure fashion, without impacting existing computing resources. See Transparency Exporter.
Memory B is capable of using a large number of information sources in its analysis and apply Big Data processing state-of-the-art technologies, performing million operations per second. This performance presents a significant advantage in relation to the home-made solutions developed independently by each corregidor, inspection and investigation bodies of governments around the world. Memory B is, therefore, able to daily and incrementally, in minutes or hours, investigate the entire population of persons (natural and legal) of a country, as well as all movements and records generated by them. Current technological power allows to investigate everything and everyone - not just a filtered or statistical portion.
In terms of information security, privacy and national security, Memory B can be run On Premises, so that sensitive data never goes beyond the boundaries stipulated by governments or institutions.
When investigating natural and legal persons without links to the government, in principle, many information is confidential or private and can only be made available through judicial authorization or permanent cooperation agreement protected by law.
For individuals and businesses with links to government, much information is obligatorily available in countries that have implemented transparency laws.
Memory B is prepared to gather and process the following types of information:
Registration / Qualification Information:
official, for citizens and companies;
unofficial, social networks;
corporate participations.
Self-declarations:
income, assets and debt;
Financial System Information:
Lists of bank accounts and investments;
Transactions, account balances and investments in the regulated system;
Idem for the unregulated system (crypto-currency);
Other records:
of movable and immovable goods;
telephone and messaging records;
Administrative information:
Data on legal proceedings;
Revenue breakdown
Expenditure breakdown.
Depending on the tool, some are mandatory and others are optional. Please refer to the Tools Diagram for more details.
Contract Guard
This tool works by identifying possible financial relationships harmful to the treasury, originated by companies providing services to the government.
The objective is to identify obscure agreements where the state’s financial resources where improperly received by the authority (individual) responsible for the contract, intermediated by the companies contracted or by persons or companies with connections detected by the tool, which would characterize the scheme of “contracting by bribery” / “contracting by gratuity”.
It crosses information on firms serving the government and revenues earned by administrators and civil servants (including the same kinship strata of politically exposed persons). It also crosses information about the transmission of values between companies with multiple levels of relationship (third, fourth, etc.) that may have connection with these people.
The tool requires, obligatorily, the following information:
Listing with the identification of the companies providing services, total value of the contract, term of service, and data on payments made and to be made - this information is guaranteed by the “Transparency Law”;
Tax notes issued and received by each company. At least, of the companies with contracts with the state.
The following optional information may reveal even more complex schemes - even more if past information can be retrieved:
Access to the list of partners of companies with contracts with the state. Better if the information is available to all existing companies.
In addition to accessing the income tax return of administrators and civil servants, access also to related persons in the same relationship as defined for politically exposed persons.
Access to bank secrecy and telephone confidentiality of administrators and civil servants. Note: the tool can infer the existence of personal relationships also via social networks.
Person Auditor
This tool is used to detect patterns of illicit enrichment or the existence of undeclared sources of income.
Analyzes income statements and movable and immovable properties of individuals (or others related thereto), invoices issued and received by legal entities (by crossing information from Money Tracking and Relationship Finder) for irregularities, cross-checking bank data and other stock movements over time.
The tool requires, obligatorily, the following information:
Access to the income statement, assets and debts of individuals and legal entities;
Access to the list of owners of movable and immovable property;
Access to the list of bank accounts and account balances;
The following optional information may reveal even more complex schemes - even more if past information can be retrieved:
In addition to the balance of bank accounts, access also to bank transactions.
Relationship Finder
This tool is used to detect relationships between persons (natural and legal), providing the necessary information for investigators (or other Memory B tools) to evidence any hidden paths traveled by financial resources.
Searches for connections between persons (natural and legal) in any distance (connection degree), using several information sources, such as:
shareholdings;
provision of services (via invoices and such);
bank transfers, debt payments and peer-to-peer loans;
buying and selling of real state and vehicles;
traffic penalties driver’s nominations;
SMSes and phone calls;
co-participation in legal proceedings;
social networks;
The tool presents existing and past connections, highlighting their intensity using a mathematical graph (a diagram similar to this one).
Money Tracking
This tool is used to determine the path that financial resources travel in the network of relationships between individuals and legal entities.
Acting in conjunction with Relationship Finder, it analyzes bank data and other financial transactions, such as company payments, regulated and unregulated investments (eg, crypto-currencies), mobile commodity companies reports (gold, jewelry, arts …), creating a graph highlighting the paths that the financial resources travel, where the weight of the edges evidences the temporal relations between the receipts and payments, allowing the establishment of causal links.
Magistracy Watch
This tool is used to highlight magistrates behavior in court cases and their relationship with the parties’ lawyers.
In order to inhibit corruption schemes between magistrates and lawyers, this tool generates metrics from legal processes under the responsibility of each magistrate and the parties’ lawyers, relating information such as:
General metrics by category of each process, value of the claim and time in each stage of the legal process;
Individual and joint metrics between judges and lawyers, ditto above;
General, individual and joint metrics on the outcome of each process;
Alerts on processes and steps that are too long-lasting;
Alerts on possible cyclical procedures.
Temporal relation alerts between the process result and data of the Person Auditor tool.
Mulct Watch
This tool is used to evidence the behavior of official agents who apply fines and other financial penalties.
This tool evidences possible corruption schemes, power abuses or over-flexibility of punishments by relating the types, amounts, days, times, and places of fines applied by each official agent.
The excuse relationships are identified from:
Large distances between the averages of the agents and the result of each individual;
Penalties applied on days, times and places incompatible with the determination and interest of the agency.
This tool is used to evidence the behavior of official agents who grant rights, benefits or permissions to individuals and legal entities.
It performs an analysis and produces reports similar to that of the Mulct Watch tool, but doing additional analysis on the beneficiaries, aiming to identify patterns and distances from the average of each official agent in regarding the rights granted by him and also correlating his personal information (and that of their beneficiaries) obtained from the Person Auditor tool with the colleagues’ averages (and their beneficiaries’ averages).
Transparency Exporter
This tool is used to publish administrative information in compliance with transparency laws.
This tool was created for well intentioned institutions who want to publish their administrative data in an online and secure fashion, without compromising existing computational resources.
External interfaces are made available for humans (web sites) as well as for automated systems (API).
The information gathering may be done passively (e.g, via file upload) or actively (through direct connections with data bases, web services, intranets, etc).
