The e-citizen

The e-citizen

            “Siga Brasil”[1] (www.senado.gov.br/siga) is an information system developed by the Brazilian Federal Senate, gathering several databases on the federal government’s planning and budget. That is an innovative experience to monitor the public accounts.  

In our contemporaneous world, the relations between State and the society became much more dynamic. The “e-governments” are good examples. On the other hand, it also gives opportunity to anyone connected to the Internet to obtaining information on the public business management. The democracy now faces a new political subject: The “e-citizen”.

            The Brazilian Constitution sets the rights of everyone to receiving information from the public institutions that are of collective or general interest (Federal Constitution, Art. 5, XXXIII). The Constitution and the Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal - LRF[2] also guarantees that the governments’ accounts should be made available to the analysis and appraisal by any taxpayer (Federal Constitution, Art. 31, § 3; LC 101/2000, art. 49).

Until very recently, the data availability was just pro-forma, since they were aggregated data, hindering any control by the society. In opposition to that obscurantism, the Federal Senate used the recent development of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to freely disclose at the Internet several databases of the Federal Government. The “Siga Brasil” allows any person to monitoring the multi-year plans and the enforcement of the annual budgetary laws.

            In Brazil, Inesc (Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos[3]) is a non-governmental organization that monitors and intervenes on the elaboration and execution of the public budget, in order to ensure the human rights (Dhesca) achievement. As soon as it was made available and accessible in the Internet, the Siga Brasil became the main mechanism for obtaining the budgetary data used by Inesc. The Siga Brasil discloses the updated budgetary planning and execution, in details and organized according to different kinds of classification. Moreover, it provides the individual taxpayer identification number (CPF) or the corporation taxpayer identification number (CNPJ) of the beneficiaries of government’s payments. Inesc uses the Siga Brasil to outline its technical analyses and provide data to the civil society partners and the media.

            Members of the Federal Senate’s Budget Consultancy unit have delivered capacity-building courses to Inesc’s team, besides attending the qualification courses organized by Inesc to the civil society. In 2008, other courses have been scheduled at regions a little farther from the power center (Brasilia), like the North region.

Additionally to the Siga Brasil, there are other initiatives that help the population to monitor the State’s expenditures. It is worth mentioning the Portal da Transparência[4] (www.transparencia.gov.br), which is organized by the Controladoria Geral da União CGU[5] and the experience of the State Government of Sao Paulo (www.fazenda.sp.gov.br/contas). Inesc’s political standing is that such experiences should build a mutual dialogue due to the uniqueness of each of them, and because they facilitate the social monitoring on public expenditures, which converts them in complementary mechanisms. The proximity of most of the population to the practice of monitoring the public expense remains a far utopia that nonetheless is not an unachievable dream.

Lucídio Bicalho - Fiscal and Budgetary Policy Assistant