Discover the highlights of the administrative reform, stuck in Congress

The administrative reform, defended by the Ministry of Economy as an instrument to streamline and modernize the public machine, has already completed a year in the National Congress and, since September, when it was approved by the special commission, has been at a standstill.

Congressman Arthur Maia (DEM-BA), who was the rapporteur of the Constitutional Amendment Proposal (PEC) 32, said in an interview to CNN in December, the project will only advance if the government puts more political effort into it. “It only prospers in the Legislature if the Executive is involved in the Legislative,” he said. One of the main obstacles is that 2022 is an election year, in which unpopular measures that affect the civil service are often avoided.

Since it was presented, the text has undergone several changes and most of the proposed measures will only be valid, if approved, for future servers.

At an event he attended in November, Economy Minister Paulo Guedes declared that the reform “would not affect any rights of current civil servants. We were just going to create a filter to enhance functionalism”.

At various times, the minister has asked for more understanding from the servers, such as the recognition that they are part of a “privileged” class.

In a recent message sent to President Jair Bolsonaro, Guedes compared the possibility of salary readjustments for public staff, at this time, to the collapse of the dam in Brumadinho, in 2019, saying that “small leaks in the Brazilian economy” could lead to “explosion” and cause the death of “everyone in the mud”, reinforcing the need to contain spending on civil servants.

See below some of the main points of the PEC and understand the progress of the Congress:

career stability

One of the most debated points of the administrative reform PEC is the stability for public servants – and the taboo on the possibility of dismissal. Arthur Maia, rapporteur of the PEC, said that the functional stability in the public service is fair, but it must be relativized.

The current text proposes that the guarantee of stability be only for State careers, that is, those that do not have a counterpart in the private sector.

Professor of Public Administration at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), Alketa Peci says that in other countries it is uncommon for civil servants to be fired, since stability, if well designed, has some advantages. “We saw this in several episodes involving the vaccine, in which Anvisa servers decided based on technical criteria, being relatively protected from political and business pressures”, he exemplifies.

Relocation of careers and functions

Another debated point is the possibility of changing roles within the government structure due to the need to allocate labor. Arthur Maia mentions that the current prohibition represents expenses with salaries related to professions that remained in the past, such as typist and videotape technician, and also justifies temporary hiring and the legality of relocations, today considered as a diversion of function.

The Administration professor agrees that the Brazilian system is too rigid, “with almost 300 careers in the federal government”, and believes that it is not sensible to move from one career to another if any area becomes obsolete or with little demand.

Regarding the possibility of having evaluation metrics, Alketa Peci considers that functional performance should be subject to further regulation, but recalls that there are already examples of public organizations that work with management contracts, such as Inmetro.

server rights

The discussion about supposed privileges of civil servants collides with the so-called acquired rights – legal understanding that the rules that were valid at the time of the public tender apply throughout the working period and that other benefits that were incorporated during the career cannot be withdrawn .

The pressure for this aspect not to be changed made the proposal for administrative reform to be focused only on future employees.

In the opinion of the technical advisor at the Center for Public Leadership (CLP), Pedro Trippi, by being intended only for new members of the civil service, the PEC lost one of its main economic possibilities. He argues that several of the benefits and trinkets – such as paid leave of three months for every five years of work and additional for length of service, which make the payroll more expensive – were kept for current employees.

performance appraisal

The administrative reform PEC also opens up the possibility of a real performance evaluation. “Today less than 0.1% of servers in the probationary stage end up being dismissed”, says Trippi.

There would be public gains, in the technician’s opinion, with the proposal of six measurement steps during the three-year period in which the ability of the person approved in the competition is being evaluated – in contrast to the current model, which provides for the evaluation only at the end of the term . The format and details of these intermediate phases have not yet been defined.

The federal government even proposed that civil servants should be periodically evaluated. The rapporteur on the special commission established that this control should be done through the .gov digital platform. Maia argued that users should have the right to be heard about the service provided. But it is not clear how employees who do not have a direct relationship with the public would be evaluated.

For Trippi, the size of the expenditure on civil servants, considered disproportionate to the quality of the service provided, is also related to poorly designed incentives, such as automatic progression by length of career, and not by performance.

He also mentions positions, mainly in the legal area, in which the entry salary is very high – and that, in a short time, the civil servant reaches the ceiling. “These systems end up being in a block and not a pyramid format, with around 80% of the servers at the top and with remuneration very inconsistent with the amounts paid in the private sector”, he ponders.

Alketa Peci comments that, in some countries, such as Chile and Portugal, structural changes in civil service were possible based on political commitments, with counterweight systems, including the participation of opponents, to make it clear that it was not personal interests that were guiding the decisions.

One example was the adoption of technical criteria for selecting senior positions of trust. The administrator emphasizes that Brazil has many more commissioned positions than the United States and that here there is no question of creating stricter choice mechanisms.

Hiring of temporary

According to experts, another clear advantage of the PEC would be the hiring of temporary employees. “This is an important flexibility, which today is not regulated, creating legal uncertainty”, says Pedro Tippi.

The advisor still considers the possibility of reducing working hours and salaries in situations of adversity to be healthy, as happened with the private sector during the pandemic, but regrets that other relevant points, such as the issue of cost control and the selection process for positions in commission , have not been addressed in the PEC.

The text’s rapporteur states that he built a more comprehensive proposal, which would also impact the Legislative and Judiciary frameworks, and questions about the legality of the measure ended up leaving the final proposal more restricted.

PEC still depends on regulations

Regarding the proposal under discussion at the Congress, Professor Alketa explains that the text has become a patchwork, as is often the case with comprehensive themes, dealing with several issues that should be looked at separately, and that it is common for specific aspects of the application require further regulation. In other words, even if the current PEC is approved, complementary rules would still be needed to regulate certain points.

“PEC is not a silver bullet. It opens the way for a set of complementary legislation to promote the modernization of the public machine”, evaluates Trippi. As it stands, the system is expensive for Brazil.

Spending on civil servants here represents around 13% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while other Latin American countries such as Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico consume in the range of 5% to 7%. There are doubts about what the savings to the public coffers would be if the administrative reform were approved, with estimates ranging from R$ 350 billion to R$ 800 billion in ten years.

Sought out by the article, the Ministry of Economy did not talk about estimated deadlines for the PEC’s vote in Congress, noting that it is not up to the technical area to comment, and highlighted the impossibility of presenting, at this time, definitive information on the budgetary and financial impacts of the reform, suggesting the consultation of different scenarios – some more aggressive and others milder – outlined in a study by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA).

The official response also confirms that specific points of the reform, such as performance evaluation criteria, should be the object of resolutions and other regulations.