Stable public service was fundamental in the case of jewelry – 03/13/2023 – Market

The stability of public servants has again been the subject of discussion in recent days, after the case of jewelry valued at around R$ 16.5 million that were sent from Saudi Arabia to Brazil and were intended for the then first lady Michelle Bolsonaro.

According to a TV Globo report, allies of then-president Jair Bolsonaro even tried to release the pieces, but were prevented by auditors from the Federal Revenue Service, who pointed out the lack of a series of formal requirements in the release request.

These jewels (a necklace, a ring, a watch and a pair of diamond earrings) were seized last October, after being confiscated upon arriving in the country with a member of the delegation from the Ministry of Mines and Energy that landed at Guarulhos Airport.

They were seized, as first revealed by the newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo, because they were not declared either as personal items, subject to payment of taxes, or as an official gift to the Brazilian State.

On a social network, Michelle Bolsonaro said she was unaware of the jewelry.

To the CNN Brasil network, the former president said that he had added to the private collection another case given by the Saudis with a pen, a ring, a watch, a pair of cufflinks and a rosary, but he denied irregularities. He denied knowledge of the objects that would have been intended for Michelle.

Amidst the repercussions of the case, one of the facts that drew attention was the importance of the stability of the Federal Revenue servers to prevent the release of valuable material into the country.

This stability is often the subject of frequent discussions. While there are those who defend it as a fundamental measure for public administration, others claim that it is a way of demotivating these workers or even making the public service inefficient.

Guaranteed by the Constitution since 1934

Stability in the public service has been guaranteed in the Federal Constitution since 1934 and has undergone occasional changes over the decades. Currently, it begins after the civil servant has gone through a period of three years exercising his function properly.

This resource has the main objective of defending the public administration. This serves to try to prevent the public machine from being used for political purposes, experts point out.

“It’s a protection mechanism that allows civil servants to say no and block attitudes of government officials that may be contrary to procedures and legality”, says Gabriela Lotta, Professor of Public Administration at FGV (Fundação Getúlio Vargas).

The case of jewels barred at the airport came to be used as an example of the relevance of this stability.

“It is a very clear example that stability protects society and not the public servant itself. It is a greater protection for the Brazilian State”, says Mauro Silva, president of Unafisco (National Association of Tax Auditors of the Federal Revenue Service of Brazil) .

“Precisely so that an A or B boss or a government boss doesn’t feel free to put pressure on the server. This is the case of jewelry where the auditors didn’t feel pressured because they were doing what the law requires”, adds Silva.

For the president of Unafisco, if there was no stability in the public service, the end of the jewelery story could be different. “Without this stability, the server could feel threatened with dismissal because of these insinuations [feitas para liberar as joias], which were not few. It is exactly to avoid this that stability exists “, he says.

Around the world, numerous countries also adopt stability in civil service.

“The great democracies ensure the logic of stability for their servers, including the US, which is a very liberal country. During the last decades there has been a movement to reduce the number of public servants in several of these countries as well, a process linked to the so-called managerial reforms or neoliberal”, explains Gabriela Lotta.

What happened in those countries that carried out reforms related to civil service, says Lotta, was a decrease mainly in the stability of civil servants who provided direct services to citizens —such as health professionals. Servers in sensitive areas that may suffer political pressure, such as the fiscal and regulatory areas, remained stable.

In Brazil, civil servants only lose their positions due to a violation considered serious, after judicial or administrative proceedings, in which there is a chance of full defense.

Criticisms of stability

In recent decades, there have been several attempts to reduce as much as possible the stability granted in the Brazilian public service.

There are those who defend the end of this stability, arguing that this measure is harmful and affects important functions because it makes workers feel unmotivated to provide a good service.

This idea that servers with stability have a lower performance, as many may feel complacent, is criticized by Gabriela Lotta.

“This logic is not proven like this. What the studies show is that several factors impact performance [inclusive o acesso a recursos, a possibilidade de crescimento na carreira, o ambiente de trabalho etc]. And without considering these various factors, you can’t make a direct association between performance and stability,” he says.

Lotta points out that stability in the Brazilian civil service “is not unrestricted” and that there are situations in which it is possible to have dismissals in some cases.

“For example, when there is abandonment of office, unjustified absence, crimes of active and passive corruption, prevarication and others. Hundreds of public servants are exonerated per year. But this process is not a unilateral hierarchical decision, it presupposes a process and several instances recursions precisely to ensure broad defense for the server and protect it from persecution, for example”, he says.

The Bolsonaro government, a staunch critic of stability in the civil service, even presented a proposal through administrative reform to change stability and leave it in its current form only for some careers, such as those that are considered strategic for public administration.

But the proposal did not proceed as the Bolsonaro government had hoped in Congress. Experts interviewed by the report believe that the chances of any measure withdrawing stability from public servants, as already discussed in past decades, are almost nil.

“I do not welcome the end of stability, as the public machine, more specifically the Brazilian one, is not prepared for this. The loss of stability would generate a series of dismissals of a political nature and the public purpose would be compromised. Stability is foreseen constitutional and its dismantling is a chaotic rupture”, says lawyer Felipe Carvalho, specialist in Public, Electoral and Administrative Law.

Carvalho believes that the stability of the service brings “comfort to the server [não todos]”, which, according to him, “could be faced if public entities had really good evaluation systems, delimited and widely disseminated”.

For the president of Unafisco, Mauro Silva, trying to put an end to stability is a threat to the country by “those politicians who want to take advantage of the Brazilian State”.

“The person who prevents this politician who wants to bring public equity to the private is the public servant with stability. The bad politician who wants to take advantage has every interest in removing the stability of the server to eliminate the one who is in front to prevent it”, he declares. Silva.

This text was originally published here.