Fundeb sees funding increase, but transfer control is flawed – 10/24/2023 – Education

One of the main mechanisms for financing basic education in the country, Fundeb has recorded an increase in resources since 2020, when its rules were changed. Despite this, the systems used to define transfers to municipalities have flaws that open up opportunities for fraud.

As a report from Sheet showed, city halls are suspected of having declared non-existent students in the EJA (Youth and Adult Education) and received more resources from the fund.

Among the control flaws for transfers are deficiencies in the registration of students in the School Census and the fragility of the federal system in which city halls provide information such as total spending on education each year — part of Fundeb’s resources are distributed based on these data .

Inep (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research), responsible for Census information, and the Ministry of Education said that they are not responsible for monitoring the municipalities that provide information for the Census. The FNDE (National Education Development Fund), which makes the transfers, did not respond to the report’s questions.

In 2020, R$170 billion were transferred via Fundeb to states and municipalities (R$213 in values ​​adjusted for inflation). Of this total, around 10% came from the federal government. This year, the total should reach R$273 billion, with 17% of the federal government’s responsibility.

The value should grow even further until 2026, when the federal government’s participation in the fund’s disbursements will reach 23% of the total.

The report from Sheet showed that more than 100 municipalities had strong increases in the number of EJA enrollments, contrary to the national trend — Fundeb transfers are, in part, based on the number of students.

“Registration is the currency of exchange for federal resources,” said education consultant Mariza Abreu. Another problem, according to her, are directors who receive bonuses according to the number of enrollments, which can encourage the number to be artificially inflated.

“This is not a Brazilian problem. In Finland they audited a sample of schools twice a year”, he stated. According to her, it is up to the Ministry of Education and state departments to act to ensure that the numbers are not fraudulent.

The problems in the systems have already been highlighted in an audit by the CGU (General Comptroller of the Union) released in April this year based on 2022, which identified a series of problems in the School Census.

An Inep quality survey carried out in 2017 identified a margin of error of 2.1% in the census data.

Despite being small, which does not make it a problem for the production of educational statistics, “the low margin of error in the data, which represents the country’s average, hides municipalities with enrollment numbers that do not conform to their realities, whether due to error or fraud”, pointed out the CGU.

“Inspections carried out by this CGU indicate the existence of municipalities with significant errors in their number of registrations”, said the text. “Such inconsistencies have the practical effect of inadequately distributing Fundeb and Education Salary resources between municipalities and altering the values ​​of federal voluntary transfers”, concluded the report.

The president of Inep, Manuel Palacios, said that the Census system has a series of restrictions to prevent errors in student declarations and that the data provided is individualized. “The School Census today is produced in such a way that you have data identifying each student. In the case of EJA, there is a request to include your own CPF and the CPF is validated”, he stated.

According to him, it is up to federal and state control bodies to monitor whether there are irregularities in the data, not Inep.

The problem in providing information is especially greater in the case of schools that fill out the data by hand.