The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and Mastercard, a global multinational financial services corporation, have agreed to explore technology-driven solutions to curb public sector corruption.
At a meeting held at the ICPC Headquarters on Monday, the Regional Manager, Cyber and Intelligence of MasterCard, Mr. Peter Ehizogie, stated that the essence of the visit was to partner with ICPC to help tackle different types of public sector payment frauds.
“What we have tried to do here today is to present ways and means where we could work and partner with ICPC to facilitate that kind of visibility, not just from a technology protection perspective, but also from a financial perspective towards enabling efficiency, security, safety and most especially transparency in the public sector”.
He added that MasterCard was developing a tech solution that could help ICPC to uncover every detail involved in financial payment fraud saying that “as corruption is going digital, there is a need to use technological driven-approaches to tackling it.”
The ICPC Chairman, Professor Bolaji Owasanoye (SAN), while responding, urged Mastercard to do more adding that the Commission was interested in tech-solutions that would aid its analysis of ethics and integrity scorecards.
“When we do the ethics and integrity compliance scorecards, MDAs give us information on four broad parameters. Right now, we collect that information manually. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected the information digitally as it was uploaded and my officers had to do the analysis manually. We don’t have to do that – it should be collectible digitally and analysed as such. That is something I am curious about, if you can deal with that, I will be interested in that possibility” he submitted.