Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT)/ Fiscal Openness Working Group (FOWG)

Controladoria Geral da União (CGU) and Secretária de Orçamento Geral (SOF)-Ministério de Planejamento, Orçamento e Gestão

Technical Learning Tour

The new Transparency Portal and the Virtual School of Budget

Meeting Notes

The Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), with the support of the Federal Budget Office (SOF) in the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management and the Office of the Comptroller General brought a group of representatives of civil society organizations and government --mainly Ministries of Finance-- from Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Paraguay six for a detailed understanding of two Brazilian initiatives that are at the forefront of fiscal openness promotion: the Transparency Portal and the Virtual School of Budget.

17 MARCH 2015

Welcome, agenda and objectives

In her introductory remarks, Ester Dweck, Secretary of the Federal Budget Office(SOF) in the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management of Brazil expressed her office’s willingness to continue the on-going learning process and sharing Brazil’s experience to link it to various other Latin American initiatives. She mentioned CEPAL’s recent event focusing on fiscal policy and highlighted the importance of fiscal transparency and its links to equitable growth. According to Dweck, transparency is essential to Brazil’s economic success and an avenue to communicate directly with everyday Brazilians.

Patricia Souto Audi, Secretary of Transparency and Corruption Prevention, Office of the Comptroller General, seeks to reinforce instruments like the transparency portal ( which helps to fight corruption, and create active transparency. It is, indeed,a powerful tool used by citizens. Audi recognizes that advances so far are not enough, and is working to ensure that citizen oversight is a core part of public participation in the budget process. She also mentioned that the CGU established a new forum where in 3 years there was an increase in the request for information, with a which 98% response rate. CGU highlights the transparency portal pages on the World Cup 2014 and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. The challenge for the CGU, though, is to help ordinary citizens understand the budget through citizen participation. Other government entities like municipalities sought technical assistance in how to become transparent through “Brasil Transparente.” Audi views this technical learning visit as a way to provide examples to help others learn, and perhaps adapt the experience to individual country contexts.

Juan Pablo Guerrero, Network Director of GIFT, explained that this visit is the first peer learning experience for the Fiscal Openness Working Group. Brazil was a natural place to start such exchanges, given its leadership and many years of experience in this field. At the Latin America Regional OGP meeting, two related issues came up on transparency portals: 1) frustration on behalf of governments, because they go to great lengths to publicize plenty budget information that is not being, and 2) the under-utilization of these valuable tools by society at large. Given these challenges, and that Brazil is in the process of reworking CGU’s transparency portal and the Virtual School on Budgets, GIFT thought this was the most opportune time to have this technical learning visit.

Social Accountability (Active Transparency) in CGU

As an introduction, Eduardo Borba and Fabio Felix of the Social Accountability section of the CGU presented the actions they have implemented to promote that all sections of Brazil’s diverse population is included in the public administration process. This office is tasked with educating citizens, civil society and other stakeholders and ensure that participation is part of the ethos of the country. Since 2004, CGU has trained and developed didactic materials for schools through toolkits, games, and other materialsto build up knowledge of youth on social accountability. CGU partners with famous cartoonists to help bridge the information gap. Borba mentioned that when the CGU talks about corruption, they want to turn it upside down and talk about the proactive steps CGU takes to prevent corruption and not react to corruption scandals. CGU makes concerted efforts to talk to citizens on practical matters like roads, schools, other infrastructure topics that people can relate to. Their programs seek to make sure that the general public understands that public spaces are their spaces and convince citizens they can help prevent corruption.

Felix states that the CGU wants to create “schools of citizenship” where citizens are a part of the accountability ecosystem in the country. By working with the youth, CGU hopes to create a future generation to help change the current attitude in Brazil. CGU has three main objectives in its social accountability efforts:

  1. Build self-esteem: to help understand that all Brazilians have the right to be a part of the accountability process.
  2. Diversity: given Brazil’s vast diversity of race, class, ethnic, sexual orientation, among others, CGU wants to ensure that everyone understands that together they can create a vibrant Brazil.
  3. Brazil, my Brazil: citizens and not the government should determine what road Brazil takes.

CGU developed social accountability toolkits to help its capacity building efforts in both the classroom and at home. Each worksheet has a public administration problem linked to a solution that highlights how can citizen participation help fix the problem. The purpose of these toolkits is to explain how a citizen being a part of the solution can help solve the problems around Brazil. CGU is working with provinces and municipalities to develop these toolkits appropriate for these governments. These efforts started in 2009, when in conjunction with the University of Brasilia, they develop a methodology,, and then started applying it in schools in 2010. They chose the most adequate age group which was 8-11 year olds. Through evaluations of teachers and parents, CGU found that both teachers and parents liked the project and were receptive and that it should be implemented throughout Brazil. To train teachers, the CGU has regional offices in most states that worked with different government institution to visit schools and teachers; there was also webinars/long-distance training and peer to peer learning.

  1. The Transparency Portal
  1. Introduction

Felix (CGU) explains how the Integrated System of Financial Administration (SIAFI, Sistema Integrado de Administracão Financeira), theinternal accounting system was instrumental for the CGU, parliamentarians, and other government actors hold the executive accountable, but access to it was not public.The government thought that citizens should have access to the portal as well, however, it was too technical which was a permanent challenge. How can the CGU expect others to be involved in the accountability process? This question led to the design and thinking of the transparency portal.

The portal is designed to address the kind of requests people have made in the past (expenditures, revenues, intergovernmental transfers, salaries, etc.) and help orient and navigate the portal. In 2012, the Freedom of Information Law (FOIA) required public servants that receive reimbursements to have to report it on the transparency portal. The portal uses open data formats, mobile and tablet formats to accommodate all requests. Expenditures are updated daily which include: amounts paid per contract with receipts which goes in detail to see what the funds were used for; which department/unit executed the funds; beneficiary of the expenditure; related budget document to help justify the expenditure; by province/municipality; by expenditure classification (functional, administrative and economic); intergovernmental transfers to be able to follow the money to different levels of government; government credit card transactions to monitor the use of these cards; blacklist of certain companies that have corruption charges. Citizens can sign up to receive SMS alerts when payments are made linked to a specific program. One of the biggest users are municipal public servants which lack the ICT structures in their municipalities.

CGU has a data warehouse where all the information is pulled from various government servers. All of the sources of the portal have different systems that are harmonized by the CGU. This is a big team whose task is to coordinate to validate the numbers where the responsibility is delegated to various units within the government to maintain the data and the portal. The team is comprised of 2 directors that come from their ICT, accounting, communications, and information database governance departments that meet once a week to discuss issues, strategies and needs of the portal. In addition to the team, 3 people are employed full time to coordinate, execute and troubleshoot any problems. The success of the portal is due to a much disciplined team and their commitment to the portal.

The databank takes about a month and a half to use information from SOF to be able to compare budgeted vs actual amounts. For this reason, the CGU transparency portal only posts actual expenditures in real time. When the CGU wants to compare budgeted vs actual, it is located in another system that at this point in time is in the process of being further developed.

Felix recognizes that citizens still need to understand how to navigate the portal, which requires knowledge of budget concepts on behalf citizens that really needed to have active participation. CGU is currently working to make the complaint line more accessible to people. Given the FOIA, CGU seeks to instill a rights-based approach to their capacity building efforts. CGU wants to work directly with CSOs to be able to bridge the gap between citizens and the government. The amount of users/visitors has been rising, with a spike in 2014. CGU predicts that as more people learn to navigate the system, the amount of users will increase. The increase in users between 2011 and 2012 is due to the passage of the FOIA and including the salaries of public servants. Currently, CGU is working with the University of Brasilia to analyze who uses the transparency portal to determine the profile of users that are not public servants.

Several participants asked about corruption scandals particularly Petrobras and CGU’s experience in handling corruption scandals. Felix responded that the CGU views these scandals as an opportunity to get closer to citizens and demonstrate how the transparency portal can be used as a tool to prevent corruption and what their responsibilities as citizens are. These scandals serve as an opportunity to recommit CGU to its commitments and broaden what should be published. At this point, state-owned enterprises (SOEs),like Petrobras, are not under the mandate of the CGU. CGU’s mandate is to oversee the federal budget and social security but not SOEs or investments which are regulated by other oversight systems.

  1. Contents of the Transparency Portal

Leodelma de Marilac Felix of the Open Government and Transparency Unit explained that the initial purpose of CGU’s transparency portals was to inform citizens how much money is being transferred from the federal government to states and municipalities. However, this was not enough. The Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management with the CGU set up a team to develop the portal with the Department of Combatting Corruption. This team developed the framework that would become the portal of today with the objective of facilitating the understanding of citizens of what the government is doing and why.

Leodelma shared the experience of Contas Abertas(Open Accounts) where legislators offered access to the SIAFI to journalists who exposed corrupt officials. This led CGU to believe that the portal should have the same information as the SIAFI. Since some institutions are not required to use the SIAFI, CGU needs to collect information from other government systems to publish it on the portal. In effect, currently, there are several accounting systems that are not fully linked. Thus, building an integrated system remains a challenge. With regards to revenue, CGU disaggregates by revenue source in order to show where the money is coming from.

A Decree in 2005 establishes the portal as a part of the government. This legal framework gives the CGU the authority to enforce and solicit information from other government agencies. This was a big challenge to ensure coordination within the federal government and follow through the implementation, and created a snowball effect where all entities of the federal government comply with this mandate.

In 2007, contracting and procurement became a part of the transparency portal. Additionally, the growing demand of information about benefits from social welfare programs like conditional cash transfer programs (Bolsa Familia) led the CGU to include information on beneficiaries.

Three people are currently tasked with thinking about the new portal.

  1. Passive Transparency in CGU

Camila Alves of the Open Government and Transparency Unit explained that the FOIA establishes Access to Information as a right to solicit information from all 3 branches, all levels of government, state-owned enterprises. This law defines passive and active transparency, and holds the principle of access to information as a universal right whereby no one needs to justify the request. The Department of Preventing Corruption trains bureaucrats on implementing the FOIA and complying with requests. Citizens can register on the e-SIC platform to submit requests, where they get a tracking number to follow up on the request. Without registering, the e-SIC can report on implementation of the FOIA. CGU uses 15 indicators on the implementation of the law.

18 MARCH 2015

  1. Backend/Datawarehouse of the Transparency Portal

Aurisan Souza de Santana from the IT department of the CGU states the challenge of the transparency portal is to integrate information from various sources to be the unique source of data for citizens. To ensure that historical data and comparability across time, the data warehouse communicates with multiple servers and each other to cross-reference to verify the information. This ensures the flexibility that is needed to be able to maintain the portal and update daily.

CGU uses transactional ETL to feed into the data warehouse. Sectoral data warehouse are used for the visualization portion of the portal. There were several problems in the beginning with being able to cross-reference information: to ensure consistency and be able to have open data formats like CSV. CGU’s transparency portal can have a group of tables that can grab information each table to be able to analyze the information. The methodology that CGU’s IT department utilizes agile developers like Product Owner and Scrum Master. The IT department can adapt other programs tothe Transparency Portal Framework.

The challenges identified by the IT include the change of technology, dependency on certain departments that are not in the CGU, and new accounts to not have double registrations.While the hardware may be expensive from Microsoft, the updates can be free since its open license. The whole project of the portal took 2 years to fully develop.The oldest part of the portal was done using ASP then Java and it currently uses Spring with scripts. With regards to the database, CGU transparency portal uses SQL Server 2012 among other servers.

  1. New Transparency Portal

Fabio Felix explains that the effort to build a new portal responds to the needs of creating a more visually appealing display of the information on the portal, making it more navigable (less clicks to answer questions), and the ability to compare the same line-item across time to get the common citizen to use it for social accountability. The new portal will have:

  • Better visualization
  • Ability to analyze the data online
  • E-learning component (games, videos, etc.)
  • Push notification
  • Blogs, social media networks, Wikis, Forums

To bridge the gap between government and citizens, the new portal wants to improve the navigability by having mobile phone apps, manuals, discussion boards, and better graphics. The new portal will serve as the transparency portal for the whole government linking the various other transparency sites on public works, access to information, etc. With the new analytical power, CGU hopes to increase the number of users.

Felix was asked whether CGU outsources some of the technical aspects of the new portal design. Some aspects of the data visualization is contracted out and some aspects the internal IT handles it. CSOs have been involved throughout the design process to adjust the expectations on both the government and civil society.

Nathalie Beghin of INESC stated that the transparency port is instrumental but it is not everything. There are opportunities for growth and improvement. Not all ministries in Brazil are as open as the CGU, which is very recent. INESC initially received all of information used in their analysis through legislators with their thematic budget work (food security, racial equality, gender, health).

  1. Fiscal Transparency in Brazil

Isabella Amaral da Silva of the Unit of Innovation and Federal Budgetary Affairs explained Brazil’s fiscal transparency efforts at the federal level. SOF sits within the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management and works thematic groups that monitors ministerial budgets. SOF worked with CGOFI, consulting firm, for training and technical assistance to provinces and municipalities and how to make the budget more accessible. They ask themselves: How do we reach the everyday citizen? How to explain technical terms? How to stimulate participation?