Release of information via the Access Law grows with Lula – 08/04/2023 – Panel

The Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) government has been more transparent than that of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in responding to requests that reached the federal administration in the first 100 days of management.

This is what the Access to Information Law Panel (LAI) shows, a platform powered by the Comptroller General of the Union with an overview of requests to the federal government.

Over four years, the Bolsonaro government received 507,337 requests for information via LAI. Of this total, 66.79% of applicants were able to access what they requested, 7.48% had their request denied and 12.14% of the time requests were discarded because they were supposedly not requests for information.

In just over three months of the PT administration, the rate of access granted to requested documents rose to 73.95%. The denials continued at a similar level, 7.68%, but only in 4.29% of the cases were the requests disqualified for not requesting information.

From January to April 2023, 35,890 requests were registered, with an average response time of 10.74 days – during the previous administration, the average was 12.32 days, says the platform.

Codevasf (Companhia de Desenvolvimento dos Vales do São Francisco e do Parnaíba) currently leads the ranking of omissions on the panel, that is, it is the federal agency that most failed to respond to requests or appeals in the legal period. Claimed 60 times in 2023, it was omitted on eight occasions. Transformed into a center of suspected corruption under Bolsonaro, Codevasf remains under the command of the center.

The panel’s list of omissions is not restricted to 2023, that is, it takes into account requests made in previous years that remain active and unanswered. Following are the Ministry of Health, with five omissions (received 1,579 requests this year), and Codeba (Companhia das Docas do Estado da Bahia), with four (with nine demands in 2023).

The Bolsonaro government has made several attempts to weaken the law. Among the attacks, decree 9.690/2019 aimed to increase the number of authorities with powers to determine whether information is confidential, decree 9.759/2020 intended to extinguish advisory councils for sectoral policies in the federal government and, during the pandemic, the government performed a data blackout and tried to suspend the time limit to respond to requests (MP 928/2020).

Sanctioned in 2011 by then-President Dilma Rousseff (PT), the Access to Information Law came into effect in 2012. Since then, public authorities have started to systematize data and open up more space for requesting information. The law determines that, if immediate access is not possible, the response must occur within a maximum period of 20 days, extendable for another 10 days upon justification.

According to the Access to Information Act Panel, 1.2 million requests have been received since May 2012, with a response rate (positive or negative) of 99.5%.

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