Towards Digital Anti-Corruption Typology for Public Service Delivery

Digital anti-corruption refers to a family of digital technology tools that are used to fight corruption. Many such tools have not performed well in practice due to their non-alignment with forms of corruption they are supposed to fight against and persistence of corruption-enabling conditions. The aim of this paper is to contribute to filling this gap by offering a typology of digital anti-corruption in public service delivery that can be used to decide what digital measures should be applied to fight against specific forms of corruption or address specific corruption-enabling conditions. The typology also highlights that digital technology can both assist in corrupt practices e.g. theft of digital personal records, and aid the fight against corruption e.g. mobile channels to report incidents of corruption, automated audits of transaction records to uncover fraudulent payments, or service automation to replace discretionary decision making by public officials with rule-based automated decision-making. The typology is grounded in research and policy literature, validated using real-life examples from East Africa, and instantiated to the public health sector. The paper concludes by presenting a range of scenarios for using the typology and offers some recommendations for public authorities.