Análise da viabilidade de aplicação da Lei de Benford em orçamentos de obras: estudo de caso.

Abstract

The Civil Construction industry takes an important role in the social and economic view in Brazil, contributing to the generation of direct and indirect jobs. However, Civil Construction needs to be observed with more zeal, since many of the public resources are used to finance public works, which, in some cases, cause great damage to public coffers, an example of some works carried out for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics and many other projects used as a means of embezzling money and benefiting third parties. As such, researchers have been looking for solutions with intention of reverse this scene and get better the inspection and identification processes of these irregularities caused in public works budgets. One of these tools is Benford's Law, a mathematical method capable of identifying frauds or changes in a database by observing the probability that the digits will occur. In this way, this research consists of analyzing the viability of applying Benford's Law in investigating of four budgets for public works of different proportions, trying to identify which are the most significant services of these budgets, as the ABC curve does, comparing the results obtained by each method, in order to measure the performance of Benford's Law and propose or not its use for this purpose. The budget spreadsheets were submitted to both methodologies and when comparing the results, a Benford’s Law showed efficient results very close to those obtained with the ABC curve. However, due to the evaluation of each method, Benford's Law selected a larger volume of data that was considered significant, which resulted in there being items present in one sample and absent in the other. In this sense, from the results obtained, the joint use of the methods can be considered a viable alternative in the budgeting of works, since, due to their complementarity, it is possible to obtain a larger volume of data and then perform a analysis of costs and services more complete.