| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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This commitment promotes transparency and social control in the public administration, the use of new technologies, and innovative solutions to open governments.
The innovations brought by Brazil Transparency Scale consist of three fundamental aspects:
• Effective verification of compliance with the legal determination by the subnational entity evaluated
• Use of the “mystery consumer” methodology by the Office of the Comptroller General
• Use of a dissemination strategy that seeks to give society maximum knowledge of the methodology used and the results obtained
When assessing the effectiveness of the implementation of Access to Information Law obligations for states and municipalities, the CGU decided to give maximum publicity to the results as a dissemination strategy. In this way, the results of Brazil Transparency Scale were announced in a press conference format.
It was also established that the results would be available on the internet, in a simple, friendly language, using open data and several infographics elaborated to inform the society and especially the subnational entities assessed about the methodology and which items were evaluated.
This dissemination strategy, including the worst outcomes, is widely used by human rights organizations and has shown positive results in advancing the issues raised.
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| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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The initiative was designed to serve primarily citizens and indirectly the managers of the three levels of government, academics, control bodies and civil society organizations engaged in actions to promote transparency, access to information and social control.
We found it was essential to support subnational entities as early as possible, using the technical capacities developed by CGU. This verification was evident after an analysis of the situation of governmental transparency from the official websites of the subnational entities, focusing the access to information regulation in the 26 states, the Federal District and 254 municipalities with a population greater than one hundred thousand inhabitants.
The results indicated that in 2014 the Access to Information Law was regulated in 19 states, in the Federal District and in 17 capitals. With regard to the 254 municipalities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, only 24% of them had the local normative on access to information. This scenario was decisive to conclude that the support to the states and municipalities in the implementation of the law would be an important action for the consolidation of a culture of access and transparency in the whole public sphere. For further information, please refer to the following link (in Portuguese): http://www.cgu.gov.br/assuntos/transparencia-publica/brasil-transparente/mapa-transparencia/mapa-da-transparencia-2
Thus, the CGU had a challenge: how to contribute to the fundamental right of access to information at the state and municipal levels, without additional budgetary resources to stimulate the implementation of the provisions of the law and taking into account the autonomy of the federated entities defined in Federal Constitution?
From this scenario, the proposal to carry out an evaluation to verify the existence and effectiveness of mechanisms of access to information offered by states and municipalities arises. With this measure, we intended to give publicity to the managers who had already implemented mechanisms of access to information, as well as to those who did not have them yet.
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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In its first edition the Brazil Transparency Scale evaluated 465 municipalities with less than 50,000 inhabitants, 27 capital cities, 26 states, as well as the Federal District. According to the methodology, the evaluation of municipalities was made from three requests for access information of important social areas (health, education and social assistance) and one request for access information based on the regulation of the Access to Information Law in the municipality. The final report of EBT, in its first edition, was released on May 15 2015, in Brasília, to celebrate three years of validity of the law in the country. However, despite that, the results were pretty worrying: 310 evaluated municipalities (corresponding to 63% of the total) had no point. The situation is even more alarming when observing the average grade of municipalities: approximately 1.35 point in a scale to goes up to 10.
The methodology was applied again, in its second edition and its final report was released on November 20 2015. In its second edition, the EBT evaluated 1,559 municipalities with less than 50,000 inhabitants, 27 capital cities, 26 states, as well as the Federal District. At this time, 789 evaluated municipalities (49,71%) had no score.
Since the conception of the initiative until the dissemination of the results of its implementation, the following steps can be highlighted:
Step 1: formation of a working group to create the methodology of transparency evaluation to be applied;
Step 2: training the civil servants to apply the methodology;
Step 3: definition of the sample group of subnational entities to be evaluated;
Step 4: realization of the evaluation;
Step 5: carry out the review of the results registered by the evaluators in the previous phase;
Step 6: consolidation of results.
In terms of human resources, we had 6 servants of the Coordination of Federal Cooperation and Social Control and 40 servers from the Corruption Prevention Centers (NAP) at the Regional Units of the CGU in states that worked directly in the design, test and application of the Brazil Transparency Scale.
In addition to these resources, online assessment questionnaires were created using the Limey Survey system, available on the internet as a free software, without costs to the Administration.
As demonstrated by the results, without additional budgetary resources it was possible to obtain notable advances in the policy of governmental transparency of several subnational entities. Thus, it is possible to consider that the initiative obtained a high degree of efficiency, in view of the allocated resources.
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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In addition to the institutional mission of CGU, several studies have already pointed out that governmental transparency, besides being a democratic element and strengthening social control, allows for greater efficiency and accountability in the management of public resources. Thus, the progress of compliance with the determinations of the Access to Information Law, provides direct benefits both to the citizen and to the Federal Public Administration itself.
It is acknowledged that involvement of other relevant actors in the assessment of local transparency and access to information is fundamental. In this way, we have envisaged an advancement of Brazil Transparency Scale to be implemented in 2017-2018, for evaluation of subnational entities that should include, in addition to the opinion of the citizens, the opinion of civil society organizations focused on the subject of transparency and public oversight.
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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After the publication of the results of the first edition of the Brazil Transparency Scale (EBT, in its acronym in Portuguese), there was a significant increase in the number of subnational entities which started to comply with the evaluation criteria used in the established methodology and which are also obligations established by the Brazilian Access to Information Law. Among these criteria, there are the virtual handling of requests for access to information and the need for local regulations of the Law.
In relation to the municipal entities, considering that the samples had different sizes in the two editions of the evaluation, it is possible to infer the improvement of the results from the analysis of the percentage by note of the municipal entities evaluated. In the first edition of the EBT, only 1.4% of the municipalities reached a grade between 9 and 10, while 63% scored zero.
In the second edition of the EBT, 61 municipalities received grades between 9 and 10, equivalent to 3.8% of the municipalities evaluated, while 51.8% received a grade of zero. Obviously, at the municipal level, the data show that a great effort is still needed to reach state levels, but the results already show improvements.
In addition to these quantitative results, the knowledge that the state / municipal managers have nowadays about the subject is remarkable, although the evaluation is still difficult to measure quantitatively. However, it is important to note that since the disclosure of the EBT results, several state control bodies (states’ Courts of Accounts, states’ prosecution services) started to request more speediness to subnational managers in implementing the access to information measures, which brought advances in the discussion of the subject within the Public Administration.
According the United Nations Convention against Corruption, each State Party shall promote the active participation of individuals and groups outside the public sector, such as civil society, non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations in the prevention of and the fight against corruption and to raise public awareness regarding the existence, causes and gravity of and the threat posed by corruption. This participation should be strengthened by such measures as, inter alia, enhancing the transparency and ensuring that the public has effective access to information (art. 13.1). Besides, our initiative has established a direct link to the SDG 16: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”.
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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The methodology of the Brazil Transparency Scale could be improved, since the mere existence of a local regulation doesn’t mean that the compliance with the law is adequate. Despite the fact that the methodology only examines the most basic obligations, the results are below expectations, especially at the municipal level. On the other hand, it is certain that the CGU is taking a step forward, principally by reinforcing the idea that it is fundamental to have an agency that is dedicated to the implementation of the Access to Information Law.
Some of the difficulties could be mitigated or overcome through adopting the following measures:
• The use of drawing of lots, through statistical sampling, eliminates doubts about political orientation. In addition, the voluntary request for evaluation with high adherence of municipalities (104 subnational entities requested to be evaluated) indicates the interest of the entities themselves in being evaluated, as positive notes can be transformed into political capital for well-evaluated managers.
• In order to further refine the methodology and give the respondent further opportunities to demonstrate compliance with legal requirements, a second review stage was included in the second edition of EBT, in which another servant, from another CGU local office, reviews all aspects of the evaluation of subnational entities which received low grades.
• In order to give more clarity to the reviewed manager about the type of adjustment or measures which needs to be adopted in order to meet transparency requirements in public management, we consider including, in the next round of the EBT, a document to be sent to the subnational body evaluated, with a clear explanation about the nature of the evaluation, which questions were not properly addressed by it, and which body or bodies to seek for further clarification.
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