APEC ACTWG and ACT-NET

The Anti-Corruption and Transparency Experts Working Group (ACTWG) is the body within Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) responsible for coordinating anti-corruption and transparency cooperation among APEC member economies. Originally established as an experts' task force by APEC senior officials in 2005, it was upgraded to a full working group in 2011 to give its work a more structured and institutionalised footing. In 2013 the ACTWG established a subsidiary operational body, the Anti-Corruption Authorities and Law Enforcement Agencies Network (ACT-NET), which connects anti-corruption and law enforcement officials across the region to support informal cross-border cooperation on corruption, bribery, money laundering, and illicit trade investigations. Both bodies receive technical support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).^[1]

1 Mandate and Strategic Plan 2023-2026

The ACTWG's activities are governed by its Strategic Plan 2023-2026, which sets out the working group's priorities over that period, and by successive Terms of Reference agreed by APEC senior officials. The working group coordinates implementation of several longstanding regional anti-corruption commitments, including the 2004 Santiago Commitment to Fight Corruption and Ensure Transparency and the associated APEC Course of Action on Fighting Corruption, and it explicitly supports member economies' implementation of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) across the Asia-Pacific region. This linkage between a regional economic forum's anti-corruption work and a binding global treaty is a common structural feature of regional anti-corruption cooperation, giving APEC economies a forum to discuss practical implementation questions that the larger UNCAC Conference of States Parties may not address in the same operational detail.^[1]

2 ACT-NET's Operational Role

Where the ACTWG functions primarily as a policy coordination forum, ACT-NET operates at a more operational level, providing a platform through which frontline anti-corruption and law enforcement officials across APEC economies can consult one another, coordinate on active matters, and share effective investigative and prosecutorial practices. This role parallels, on a regional Asia-Pacific basis, the global function performed by the UNODC's GlobE Network, and reflects a broader pattern across the anti-corruption value chain in which policy-setting bodies are paired with separate operational networks focused on practitioner-to-practitioner cooperation.^[1]

3 The 2022 Digital Disruption to Corruption Workshop

In 2022 the ACTWG convened the "Workshop on Technology for Transparency: Digital Disruption to Corruption," bringing together officials and experts from across the region to examine how emerging digital technologies could be applied to corruption prevention and detection. The workshop highlighted a range of specific national initiatives, including data analytics applications for detecting anomalous procurement or payment patterns, experimentation with blockchain and cryptocurrency tracking tools, the expansion of digital public services and e-government platforms as a means of reducing discretionary, in-person contact points prone to bribery, and a variety of digital whistleblowing tools, including China's use of the WeChat messaging platform for corruption reporting and South Korea's Clean Portal reporting system. The workshop also discussed South Korea's Digital Anti-Corruption System and Singapore's Digital Investigation Paper initiative, alongside experimental blockchain-based procurement pilots undertaken in Colombia and South Korea. This workshop's findings substantially informed the ACTWG's later, more comprehensive 2025 assessment of anti-corruption technologies across the region.^[2]

4 The 2025 Issues Paper on Anti-Corruption Technologies

In 2025 the APEC Policy Support Unit published Issues Paper No. 15, Technologies for Preventing, Detecting, and Combating Corruption, which consolidated and updated the themes raised at the 2022 workshop into a formal policy assessment. The paper frames technology adoption in terms of the three broad stages of the anti-corruption value chain, prevention, detection and investigation, and sanction, including asset recovery and denial of safe haven, and situates specific tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and blockchain applications within that framework. The paper also candidly discusses the limits of technology adoption, noting that implementation across the region is constrained by cost, ethical considerations around surveillance and privacy, and the need for robust governance frameworks to accompany any new tool, echoing concerns raised elsewhere regarding facial recognition and other more intrusive detection technologies.^[3]

5 Readiness-Level Recommendations

A distinctive feature of the 2025 Issues Paper is its recommendation structure, which is calibrated to an economy's technological "readiness level," categorised as low, moderate, or high, rather than proposing a single uniform roadmap for all APEC members. This approach reflects the wide variation in digital infrastructure, data governance capacity, and institutional maturity across APEC's twenty-one member economies, and is intended to make the paper's guidance practically actionable for economies at earlier stages of digital transformation, rather than presenting recommendations that are only achievable by the region's most technologically advanced members.^[3]

6 Putrajaya Vision 2040

The ACTWG's growing focus on digital tools for anti-corruption purposes is also linked to APEC's broader Putrajaya Vision 2040, the forum's overarching long-term agenda, which includes a strong digital transformation component covering the region's economic and governance modernisation more generally. By tying its anti-corruption technology work to this wider vision, the ACTWG situates corruption-specific digital tools within the same modernisation agenda driving broader e-government and digital economy initiatives across APEC economies, rather than treating anti-corruption technology as a standalone or niche pursuit.^[3][4]

See also: Anti-Corruption Value Chain, AI and Machine Learning in Anti-Corruption, UNODC, UNCAC and GlobE.

References

1. APEC, "Anti-Corruption and Transparency Working Group," apec.org, and ACTWG Strategic Plan 2023-2026.
2. APEC Anti-Corruption and Transparency Experts Working Group, "Workshop on Technology for Transparency: Digital Disruption to Corruption" (2022).
3. E.A. San Andres and G.N.A. Vasquez, APEC Policy Support Unit, Issues Paper No. 15, Technologies for Preventing, Detecting, and Combating Corruption (Singapore, 30 July 2025).
4. APEC, "APEC Putrajaya Vision 2040," apec.org.