18-20 October 2023

The 9th annual conference of the Asia Pacific Public Electronic Procurement Network, organized by the Asian Development Bank, was held on October 18-20, 2023 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

About 120 representatives of the Asia-Pacific countries gathered in the Georgian capital to discuss opportunities to improve public procurement procedures, especially through innovative technologies. The event was attended by representatives of the Parliament and government of Georgia, leading experts from the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, as well as representatives of many other international organizations.

Vitaliy Trenkenshu, founder and CEO of redflags.ai, gave a presentation on the company’s experience in eliminating corruption in public procurement in Kazakhstan using innovative technologies, as well as involving citizens in the monitoring of procurement processes.

The problem of dishonest public procurement in Kazakhstan is very acute: due to various offenses, the country’s budget loses about 470 million US dollars annually. It is very difficult to control procurement, because every year the government enters into more than 1.5 million contracts with more than 80,000 suppliers.

The redflags.ai company has developed an analytical system that allows you to automatically identify signs of wrongdoing and place red flags next to suspicious transactions - tags that focus auditors’ attention on risky transactions and allow them not to waste time checking thousands of applications, focusing only on transactions with high risks.
The system updates more than 100 million rows from 5 data sources daily, analyzing tender documentation, payment data, tax data and other information.

In six months of using the redflags.ai system, thanks to its use by both government organizations and public observers, the government of Kazakhstan was able to achieve the following results:

• 132K items with risk factors were identified
• US$ 305M in financial violations were identified
• 70% of red flags were identified at the planning stage
• 1,685 procurement officers were brought to disciplinary responsibility
• 90 cases were transferred to law enforcement agencies
• US$ 86M of taxpayer's money has been saved

Vitaly's report and his demonstration of the real-life red flags dashboards aroused great interest among the conference participants. We thank the event organizers and participants for the opportunity to share our experience. If you would like more information about the red flags system, please contact us.