What's New?
Budgets Can Draw the Line on Corruption
Corruption and political manoeuvring use the same tools: bargaining and inducement. The difference is intent. Corruption secures private advantage; manoeuvring pursues public value.
Our new IMF PFM Blog post and 2026 ECPR paper explain why officials stay silent about corruption, the mutual vulnerability trap, and how the budget cycle can draw the line before the money moves. Tested on 24 cases of political manoeuvring, 18 integrity mechanisms and 36 megaprojects and PPPs, our Follow-The-Money framework shows that public value, private extraction and institutional damage often coexist. The fix is routine measurement built into the budget, not reaction to scandal.
Estimating and
Creating Fiscal Space
Estimating the Costs of Corruption
AFI’s model estimates the costs of corruption and other efficiency losses at US$4.5 trillion at the general government level: about 5% of world GDP, and more than four times the annual gap in financing the Sustainable Development Goals. Losses are estimated by sub-system, sector and level of government. Comments on the working paper are welcome at cosic.review@artificialfiscalintelligence.com.
Find the Leaks
Curbing Corruption Through The Budget Process A Systematic Approach to Estimating and Creating Fiscal Space
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY FISCAL INTELLIGENCE?
Fiscal Intelligence
“It’s the ability to apply public financial and performance information of social, economic and political value to achieve better policy outcomes. Governments only use a fraction of the data available to them. Modern technology now provides the opportunity to design tools that can harness that latent value and allow policy makers to make more informed decisions based on clearer evidence. ” (AFI Founders)
WHERE WE'VE WORKED
From stable systems to fragile states
Our founders have worked inside finance ministries and with their partners in 47 countries, including Timor-Leste, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Liberia, Cambodia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Malawi and Australia.
- Timor-Leste: TiFIS, the Timor-Leste Fiscal Intelligence System, supporting budget preparation, forward estimates and costed policy priorities.
- Iraq: the Iraqi Fiscal Intelligence System (IFIS), built from legacy Ministry of Finance and Board of Supreme Audit data, presented at a workshop in February 2024.
- Afghanistan: AFIS, the Afghanistan Fiscal Intelligence System, from 2020.
- Indonesia: sub-national and village fiscal intelligence with the World Bank, including the Village Public Expenditure Review (ViPER) and a village value-for-money approach.
- Malawi: MaFIS, public accountability and fiscal intelligence tools for parliamentary finance committees and analysts, drawn from publicly available data.
- Risk diagnostics: our development and fiduciary risk methodology, first applied in Papua New Guinea in 2009, has since been used in Afghanistan, Ghana, Iraq, Liberia, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste and with UNRWA.
TECHNICAL COOPERATION SYSTEMS
We have a suite of diagnostic, performance management and budget preparation tools and applications in support of improved fiscal intelligence. These go well beyond the standard approaches including fiscal space forecasting and ways to measure risk and the costs of corruption and other inefficiencies. We believe that our technical cooperation system is an effective way to apply the tools our founders have used and developed over 25 years. Our end-to-end technical cooperation engagement solution starts at diagnostics and consensus building through to reform strategy development, performance monitoring systems, and an implementation mechanism designed to incentivize team and institutional performance. Click here to find out more.
We start with diagnosing the problems
Then we help build a consensus
By being strategic in reform planning
And fostering great budget practices
While helping to monitor internal agreements
By incentivising teams to take calculated risks
MEET OUR FOUNDERS
Meet Vin and Andrew our Founders and Directors
WHY WE SHOULD WORK TOGETHER
AFI is founded on the belief that we can be a cost-effective partner for developing countries needing assistance on their path to fiscal self-reliance and their donor government partners. We are an expertise-based organisation. We only work in areas where we feel we have experience and unique expertise. We draw on a global network of people who are development experts who look for the best opportunities to advance the cause of poor people rather than recruiting professional contractors.
WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT
Here are our five key traits that define our approach to fiscal development:
Committed to country systems
We are committed to using country systems to improve them. This means working within the prevailing political, economic, and social systems and using existing local data to better inform decision makers and strengthen analysis
Using Incentives in Implementation
We believe in using incentives to improve implementation including direct support for local reformers and reform teams, building institutional and social accountability and by using international assistance strategically
Embrace Cost-Effective Technology
We embrace the use of cost effective, cutting edge technology and innovation to help solve problems, improve transparency and accountability, and break aid and TA dependency traps
Proactively Building Alliances
We are actively working to build an alliance of like-minded leading experts in diverse but complementary fields that prioritise problem solving and political and technical consensus building in order to create the conditions for reform and effect desirable change
Targeting the Nexus
We always seek to drive the nexus of public finance and anti-corruption, public accountability and institutional culture with service delivery to ensure policy and reform agendas prioritise improving the lives of citizens, especially the poor and the most vulnerable in society.