Tag Archives: Guilherme France

Guest Post: The OECD’s Report on Brazil Should Be a Wake-Up Call

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Today’s guest post is from Guilherme France, the Research and Advocacy Manager at Transparency International Brazil and a PhD candidate at the Institute for Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

The OECD Working Group on Bribery (WGB) conducts periodic reviews (in successive “phases”) on how well signatories to the OECD Convention on Preventing Bribery of Foreign Public Officials. Recently, the WGB published its Phase 4 report on Brazil. The picture it paints is rather bleak, and should be a wake-up call for Brazilian citizens and, one hopes, the Brazilian government. While the WGB also acknowledged some improvements in Brazil’s anticorruption framework (such as better inter-institutional cooperation, an increase in funding for law enforcement agencies, and efforts to enact a stronger whistleblower protections), Brazil is underperforming with respect to enforcement, and backsliding with respect to institutional independence. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Corruption in Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution–Early Lessons from Brazil

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Today’s guest post is from Guilherme France, a legislative assistant in the Brazilian Senate

The urgency of halting the Covid-19 pandemic, combined with the limited supply of vaccines, has increased the challenges of distributing the vaccine quickly but fairly. As others have pointed out, including on this blog, there are significant risks of corruption in the vaccine distribution process. Brazil provides a troubling illustration of this problem, with instances of corruption or other improprieties related to vaccine distribution having already sparked investigations into mayors and other local officials. For example, there have been complaints that in Manaus, a Covid-19 epicenter, relatives of a local businessman in were fraudulently appointed as employees in health clinics so that they would qualify for early vaccination. And this is but one of several cases where mayors and other local officials allegedly helped their relatives or close associates cut in the line. There have also been reported attempts to pay bribes to nurses for early vaccine access.

There has been similar line-cutting behavior on a grander scale, with various groups, such as prosecutors and judicial authorities, using their political influence and leverage to attempt (without success) to get priority status for receiving the vaccine, ahead of those, like health care workers and the elderly, who need it more urgently. On other occasions, the government acceded to the use of the “priority status” for vaccine distribution as a bargaining chip. In the midst of strike negotiations, it agreed to place truck drivers and other transportation workers ahead of the general population in the vaccination line.

This behavior, while reprehensible, is understandable. Given how hard Brazil has been hit by Covid-19, access to the vaccine is a life and death matter, and the temptation to cut the line, for oneself or a loved one, is just too great. This is why increased control and transparency for vaccine distribution should be a priority for governments at all levels. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Promoting Procurement Transparency During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

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Today’s guest post is from Guilherme France, the Research Coordinator at Transparency International Brazil (TI Brazil), together with TI Brazil researchers Maria Dominguez and Vinicius Reis.

While the new coronavirus has slashed through Brazil at alarming rates since March, an old problem has undermined the government’s response: corruption. A considerable portion of the government money spent to deal with the pandemic may have already been lost to corruption and waste. To give just a few examples: in Amazonas the state government bought inadequate medical ventilators from a wine store; In Santa Catarina, the government spent over US$5 million on 200 ventilators that were never delivered; and in Rio de Janeiro, fraud led to losses of more than 700 million reais in the hiring of a company to construct emergency hospitals, most of which were never delivered.

As many have pointed out, the corruption risk in procurement is heightened during an emergency, because traditional procurement rules are relaxed or circumvented to allow goods and services to be purchased in a timely fashion. In Brazil, the problem is compounded by a lack of centralization—with over 5,000 independent government entities (federal institutions, states, and municipalities) competing with each other and international buyers for the same equipment.

In this challenging context, efforts to increase the transparency of government procurement and to promote social accountability are essential. To promote greater integrity and transparency in COVID-19 emergency procurement, last May Transparency International Brazil (TI Brazil) and the Federal Court of Accounts jointly published a set of Transparency Recommendations in Public Procurement. These recommendations inspired a methodology for assessing how well government entities were implementing transparency mechanisms to make emergency procurement data available in their websites. (The assessment method examines four dimensions: (1) the presentation of detailed information on suppliers and contracts, (2) the publication of data in open formats that allow complex analysis, comparison, and reuse; (3) information on the government’s own legislation regarding emergency procurement and related matters; and (4) the quality and availability of channels for citizens to make Freedom of Information requests and report on irregularities related to COVID-19 procurement, as well as the existence of committees, with civil society organizations, to monitor emergency procurement.) Using this method, TI Brazil has created an index on Transparency Ranking on Efforts Against COVID-19, which ranks government entities on a 0-100 scale and also assigns a designation of Poor, Bad, Regular, Good or Great, depending on how well the entity performs on the four dimensions of transparency described above. The initial index included an assessment of 53 local governments (states and state capitals), and monthly evaluations have been undertaken since.

The results are impressive so far. Between the first and the third rounds, for instance, every local government analyzed improved its score, and in the most recent round, 33 governments (20 capitals and 13 states) earned a transparency grade of “Good” or “Great”. The average scores increased from 46 to 85 (capitals) and from 59 to 85 (states). Continue reading →

Guest Post: The World’s Biggest Anticorruption Legislative Package You Haven’t Heard About Is in Brazil

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Today’s guest post is from Professor Michael Freitas Mohallem (head of the Center for Justice and Society at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Bruno Brandão (Director of Transparency International, Brazil), and Guilherme France (a researcher at FGV).

Transparency International’s Brazilian chapter, together with scholars at FGV’s Rio and Sao Paolo law schools, are leading a wide-ranging effort, with input from multiple sectors of Brazilian society, to develop a package of legislative, institutional, and administrative reforms—the “New Measures Against Corruption”—that will address the systemic causes of corruption and offer long-term solutions. The project, which was developed over approximately 18 months in 2017 and 2018, was prompted by two related developments. First, so-called Car Wash (Lava Jato) operation has uncovered one of the biggest corruption scandals in modern times, implicating hundreds of politicians, civil servants, and business leaders. Second, although the Lava Jato operation led to a proposal, spearheaded by some of the Lava Jato prosecutors themselves, for “Ten Measures Against Corruption,” which was endorsed by over 2 million people, that effort was stymied by the National Congress. So, despite the success of Lava Jato in exposing and punishing corruption, Brazil has not yet developed the necessary long-term reforms to address the underlying sources of the problem.

The New Measures Against Corruption are intended to provide a path forward for Brazil, setting out a bold reform agenda that addresses issues relating to prevention, detection, and prosecution of corruption. The New Measures consist of a package composed of 70 anticorruption measures—ranging from draft federal bills, proposed constitutional amendments, and administrative resolutions—in 12 categories:

  1. Systems, councils and anticorruption Guidelines;
  2. Social accountability and participation;
  3. Prevention of corruption;
  4. Anticorruption measures for elections and political parties;
  5. Public servant accountability;
  6. Public servant investiture and independence;
  7. Improvements in internal and external control;
  8. Anticorruption measures for the private sector;
  9. Investigation;
  10. Improvements in criminal persecution;
  11. Improvements in the fight against administrative improbity;
  12. Tools for asset recovery.

The complete report on all 70 proposals (which runs 626 pages, and so far is only available in Portuguese) is here. Further discussion of the specific proposals would be welcome, both from domestic and international commentators, and we hope that at some point soon we will be able to provide summaries and translations of all of the measures. But in the remainder of this post, we want to offer some more background on the process that we used to develop the New Measures, as well as the prospects going forward for pushing the government to adopt these reforms. Continue reading →