Detecting and Preventing Fraud in e-procurement of Public Sector: A Review, Synthesis and Opportunities for Future Research

Abstract

The visibility of fraud losses in the public sector has harmed public service delivery. Reduced fraud can help the country's infrastructure expand by providing resources for better healthcare and education, reducing poverty, and funding security and defence. E-Government has turned the public sector into a more dynamic and diverse platform for government activity. Therefore, organizations, especially from the public sector, need to equip themselves with effective prevention and detection methods since preventing, detecting and justifying fraud is vital to combat e-procurement fraud. The most recent technology pertinent to such preventive and detection mechanisms must also be taken into account. The paper employed a comprehensive evaluation of 46 peer-reviewed studies published between 1998 and 2022 that address various areas of public sector e-procurement fraud prevention and detection mechanisms. This study supplemented the resulting state-of-the-art of e-procurement fraud prevention and detection mechanisms by integrating cross-disciplinary contributions from reviewing 10 papers on e-procurement, 22 papers on fraud prevention and detection mechanisms and 14 papers on fraud, procurement, cyber fraud, cybercrime and cybersecurity in order to assist in breaking down disciplinary silos and strengthening the management perspective. The review will be beneficial in understanding present fraud prevention and detection mechanisms practiced specifically in Malaysian government e-procurement. By identifying current government policies practises in preventing and detecting e-procurement fraud, government agencies may be able to assess the issues encountered and make amendments where necessary by providing new information in relation to good governance and strong internal control systems. The review as well finds that certain factors, such as e-procurement fraud prevention and detection methods implemented in the public sector, are severely underdeveloped. This study shows how the results of earlier studies executing preventive measures which contain solid control methodology like fraud detection and employers' knowledge of fraud prevention mechanisms where it actually tends to cover the research gaps which have been identified from the previous studies. In that case, it is important for directors or top management, auditors as well as the middle management to know their role in coming up with such preventive measures to overcome the e-procurement fraud cases happening at their organizations. The paper add knowledge to the academic world, enabling future research in this field to be expanded by exploring particular prevention and also detection mechanisms in depth.