44% of Government Agencies Pay Extra Salaries, Audit Finds

08/06/2018 - 09h11

An audit from TCU (Tribunal de Contas da União), Brazil's Federal General Accounting Office, in payrolls from the three government branches - Executive, Legislative and Judiciary - found irregular payments to 12,658 government employees. Other 4,380 cases are still under investigation.

The whole sum is costing R$ 730.6 million (US$ 197 million) to the government every year.

The Office's experts discovered 21 different kinds of issues, such as payments for pensioners already deceased, employees on disability retirement that kept their employment, people who kept two government jobs in situations where this was not allowed, and employees who kept jobs or functions in the private sector.

	Marcelo D. Sants/FramePhoto
	The Federal Court of Accounts Building in Brasilia

The audit, which is still ongoing, analyzed data from 652 federal agencies. Irregularities were found in 287 of those, which amounts to 44% of all agencies surveyed. However, the office has not disclosed the number of issues per agency nor any information on individual cases.

The audit was done in the March 2017 payrolls. In that particular month, 4.4 federal employees - both active and in paid leave - and pensioners received R$ 22.2 billion (US$ 6 billion) in wages.

The heads of the agencies flagged by TCU will be called to clarify these issues and will be responsible for solving these problems and halt the irregular payments.

Translated by NATASHA MADOV

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