The NSSF is a national savings scheme mandated by government through the NSSF Fund Act, cap 222 to provide social services to employees in Uganda, established by an act of parliament in 1985 (NSSF Records 2010). NSSF uses E-procurement for contracts to achieve benefits such as increased efficiency, cost savings , improved transparency in procurement services , Despite this benefits, it is faced with numerous procurement challenges in the 2008 acquisition of 564 acre piece of land at 11 billion shillings NSSF was accused of procurement fraud due to failure to advertise procurement of that value,( New Vision 27 October 2008).
AUDIT REPORT
Apart from that the PPDA audit report 2012 also questions a number of procurement activities at NSSF including the contract for the supply of fumigation services in which it was marred by irregularities. All these irregularities happen despite the existence of ICT systems at NSSF.
PROCUREMENT
According to Chaffey (2007) Information and communication technology involves the use of computers and telecommunication especially internet to send and receive information. Globally information and communication technology is of utmost importance the total money spent on IT worldwide has been most recently estimated as US $3.5 trillion, and is currently growing at 5% p.a. doubling every 15 years, IT costs, as a percentage of corporate revenue, have grown 50% since 2002,Weele, etal (2010).Information and communication technology plays a valuable role throughout the Fraud Management Lifecycle. There is not a stage in the Fraud Management Lifecycle that does not benefit from the effective application of information technology resources or suffer from inefficient or inflexible systems, processes, or staff. Information technology resources are frequently the key to the success or failure of the activities in the individual fraud stages and at times to the success or failure of the entire Fraud Management Department (Ernst and Young, 2000), Information and communication technology (ICT) is defined as a process of automatic acquisition, storage, manipulation, movement, control, display, switching, interchange, transaction or reception of data or information Lysons(2000).In the modern world, competition among organizations is a common issue.
PROCUREMENT IN UGANDA
Procurement fraud occurs when an employee or other person related to a firm unlawfully gains an advantage in purchasing goods or services for that firm. Some of the more common types of procurement fraud are overpaying for products (and receiving kickbacks), creating and falsely paying duplicate vendors, creating and paying fictitious vendors, and paying for over-shipments from vendors Saunders (1997).According to National fraud authority London (2010), in most developed countries, public procurement takes place within a framework of international obligations, such as the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Government Procurement or the Procurement Directives made under regional agreements such as the European Union or the North America Free Trade Agreement. Uganda as a country procurement fraud has been experienced in many sectors and occasions including Temangalo land issue, mismanagement of national social security fund and during CHOGM in 2007 in Uganda. According to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM 2007) Kampala, the committee estimated that CHOGM expenditure almost doubled from the authorized and appropriate budget of two hundred seventy billions shillings (270,000,000,000/=) to over five hundred billions (500,000,000,000/=). According to PAC report (2010), some roads which were designed by the consultants were never worked on yet the designers had already been paid. Despite the fact there is constant improvement in ICT systems and the huge amount of money invested in ICT by the government, organizations are still incurring heavy losses in terms of high costs in procurement like inflated contracts over the budget, failure to finish work in time, leading to losses of tax payers’ money, this is very disturbing to all the stakeholders as to why such mishaps continue to happen. Basing on this background the researcher therefore seeks to investigate into the impact of information and communication technology on procurement fraud at NSSF.
