# Process Automation and Blockchain in Intelligence and Investigation Units: An Approach
## 2 A Motivational Example  
While considering a case of action in the fight against crimes such as corruption and money laundering, we consider a scenario of specialized units that acted or supported complex criminal investigations involved with high and complex volumes of data [11].  
Created by the Brazil's Department of Assets Recovery and International Legal Cooperation in 2007, the Technology Laboratory Against Money Laundering (LAB-LD) performs, among its main activities, the support of complex investigations related to crimes such as money laundering and corruption [12; 13].  
As part of the Federal Laboratory Network against Money Laundering (REDELAB), there were 52 laboratories distributed across several public prosecutors, police agencies, and other intelligence and investigation organizations across Brazil in 2019. In these laboratories, activities related to the analysis of a vast amount of information collected from a variety of sources (e.g., bank accounts,emails, or telephone records of investigated people) are performed to uncover illicit assets or recover embezzled public money (among other activities), using methodologies developed by specialists and replicated for the entire network of laboratories [12; 13].  
Figure 2 presents an example of a general flow of requests forwarded to these laboratories.  
In the above example, stakeholders submit requests to laboratories, wherein specialists use tools and data available from various sources, methodologies, techniques, and operational procedures to perform activities that achieve expected results. To fulfill the request and reach the expected result, one or more specialists may be involved during the performed flow of activities.  
In the exemplified scenario, an opportunity arises to adopt solutions that contribute to agile results, simplification, and process optimization, as well as reducing the use of necessary resources to carry out operational activities.  
During the execution of various activities inherent to these specialized units, as well as steps related to process automation application, different assets are generated and there may be a need to manage their use, storage, and/or sharing within a unit or between different units (units may be located in one or more organizations).  
In this case, specialists responsible for these assets need to not only perform CRUD operations (create, read, update, and delete) on the generated assets but also have available means to perform with greater reliability: access control, auditability, versioning identification, authenticity, non-repudiation, integrity verification, and security of the generated digital assets.  
Inspired by this context, in subsequent sessions, this article presents an approach to assist in the process automation application by proposing blockchain technology as a support mechanism in the management, storage, and/or sharing of generated digital assets.  
This paper is organized as follows: Section 3 outlines a brief overview of the literature and related work. Section 4 presents the approach proposed in the study. Section 5 presents the evaluations, results, and discussions. In Section 6, research limitations are discussed. Finally, in Section 7, we present conclusions.