Intelligent Payment Verification & Control System

The Challenge

The Office of the Accountant-General of Kano State processes a large volume of payment requests, approvals and schedules from Ministries, Departments, Agencies and Local Government Councils, received through a mix of paper-based and electronic submissions. Manual verification makes it difficult to reliably detect duplicate schedule entries, resubmission of previously paid requests, reworded versions of earlier requests, and submissions routed through an inappropriate payment channel — creating risk of financial leakage and inconsistent oversight.

Our Proposed Approach

Hictij Solutions proposed a secure digital platform combining document digitisation, structured data extraction and a combination of exact and semantic (NLP-based) duplicate detection to compare every new submission against historical records — not just within the current financial year. The design centres on a simple GREEN/AMBER/RED risk-flagging model: automated checks surface anomalies for human review, but final decisions remain with authorised officers, with every override reason captured in a tamper-evident audit trail.

Key Capabilities

• Scanning and OCR extraction from signed paper submissions;
• Ingestion of Excel, PDF and Word schedules into a standardised database;
• Unique reference-number registration for every request, with optional QR/barcode linkage to physical files;
• Internal schedule duplicate detection (repeated beneficiaries, accounts, invoice numbers, amounts);
• Historical cross-referencing against prior submissions, approvals and payments;
• Semantic similarity detection for reworded resubmissions;
• Configurable jurisdiction/routing rules to flag payments submitted through the wrong channel;
• Side-by-side comparison view with plain-language explanations for every alert;
• Role-based access control and a full audit trail of every action, decision and override;
• Management dashboards covering volumes, flagged anomalies, and trends by MDA/LGA.

Status & Outcome

Proposal submitted for consideration, including a phased pilot covering a sample of historical and current transactions with measurable performance indicators ahead of any wider rollout.