Lula’s CGU retreats and reestablishes board against deviations – 04/04/2023 – Power

The CGU (Controladoria-Geral da União) will re-establish the Directorate of Special Operations, which promotes investigations to combat deviations and misuse of public resources, after having demoted the sector to coordination located within a cabinet.

The retreat takes place after a report by the Sheet point out that employees were dissatisfied with the change and complained that the topic had been put in the background by the CGU.

The body claims that the demand for maintaining the area as a directorate has existed since January, made by sector employees, and has now been met.

Prior to the downgrade, the Special Operations Board was located in the Office for Combating Corruption, which was extinguished and had most of its attributions transferred to the Office for Private Integrity.

One of the reasons why it was demoted to coordination was changes made to the structure of the CGU, such as the creation of the National Information Secretariat, without increasing the body’s costs.

With the return of the Directorate of Special Operations, it will be located within the Federal Control Secretariat. It will also have two coordinators under its umbrella, who will monitor the work of the operations.

The special operations, which the CGU usually carries out in partnership with agencies such as the Federal Police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, are aimed at combating irregularities and the misapplication of public resources.

The CGU itself calculates that since 2003 these operations have resulted in a total loss of R$ 6 billion in misappropriation of public funds.

The board’s announcement was made to CGU employees in a videoconference meeting on Wednesday (29), in which minister Vinícius de Carvalho and the body’s number two, executive secretary Vânia Vieira, were present.

At the meeting, whose audio was obtained by SheetVânia says that civil servants have already been asking them to “re-evaluate the issue of Coordination of Special Operations and elevate it to the status of directorate”.

“We, from that moment on, started working on that perspective, and doing all this gymnastics [na estrutura da CGU] so that we can recreate the Directorate of Special Operations”, he said.

After the two had made the presentation to the servers about structural changes in the Controllership, they opened the space to answer questions.

The first of them, read by Vinícius himself, was about “the fact that the elimination of the Secretariat for Combating Corruption and the elimination of terms such as transparency and corruption from the name of the secretariats would not have had a good effect among many servants in the house”.

He complained about the complaints that have been made in this regard, and defended the changes he made to the body, such as the creation of the Private Integrity Secretariat, which encourages good practices in the private sector to prevent irregularities.

The minister also stated that the body is currently working with the concept of “combating corruption”, which includes both prevention and ostensive combat.

“I can’t understand, I’ll be very honest with you, how can anyone think, after what we’ve done over these two, three months here, with the Access to Information Law, that we’re not investing in prevention of corruption, that we are not investing in transparency”, he said.

“After 64 thousand cases of secrecy in the last four years, people?”, he questioned.

“Isn’t this a much greater proof of our will, of our public spirit, of the intensity with which we are dedicating ourselves to this project, than a supposed negative message that would have resulted from a change of name, from ‘transparency’ leaving the name of the secretariat and enter the name ‘public integrity’?”, he continued.

Sought after, the CGU confirmed the change in the status of the sector responsible for special operations.

The body informed, in a note, that this change is “part of the body’s efforts to continue strengthening actions to combat corruption”.

“The change in the structure responds to a demand presented by the servers at the beginning of the year and, according to the commitment then assumed by the current management, will be met now when the review, started in January, of the entire administrative structure is being finalized”, says the note.

The CGU also says that “it will receive other adjustments also identified as necessary to guarantee greater effectiveness and organicity to the activities carried out.

“The fact that the Special Operations area was, during this period, with the status of General Coordination and not a Directorship in no way impacted its performance with the PF: in these first months alone, 8 joint special operations were carried out with an amount of Rs involved. $462 million and potential loss of $45 million.”

In an interview with Sheet in February, a month after taking office, Carvalho stated that he intended to lead the body to resume a relevant role in the application of the Anti-Corruption Law and to take stock of the ten years that law has been in force.

“The anti-corruption policy cannot be forgotten, set aside. But it cannot be done in defiance of the rule of law, because then the fight against corruption becomes corrupted, and we enter an infinite cycle of instrumentalization of the fight against corruption by the political agenda. And that can no longer happen in the country,” he said at the time.

During the Jair Bolsonaro government, the controllership was criticized, among other things, for maintaining various secrecy of documents considered to be of public interest and for hindering the application of the Law on Access to Information.