2023-09-26 02:25:43
© Reuters. STF Plenary 04/04/2018 REUTERS/Adriano Machado
By Fabricio de Castro
SÃO PAULO (Reuters) – The Federal Attorney General’s Office (AGU) sent a statement this Monday to the Federal Supreme Court (STF) in which it defends the partial unconstitutionality of constitutional amendments that created an annual ceiling for the payment of court orders for 2022 to 2026, in addition to obliging the Union to accept credits from final and unappealable decisions as payment for grants and in the purchase of public properties.
The AGU’s statement was made within the scope of two direct unconstitutionality actions (ADIs) that are in the STF, filed by the PDT and civil society entities. Precatório are debts that the Union has due to court decisions.
The ceiling was established by a legislative initiative by Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which in 2021 stated that there was not enough budget space to cover the payment of around 89.1 billion reais in court orders in 2022.
In its statement, the AGU argued that after the opening of fiscal space by the amendments — due to the limitation of spending on court orders — “mandatory expenses were created with an estimated additional cost of 41 billion reais per year”. In 2022 In the first year of the ceiling’s validity, Bolsonaro was seeking re-election.
With the help of a technical note formulated by the Ministry of Finance, the AGU argued that the ceiling for court orders produced “a significant and growing volume of artificially held back expenses”, to be paid only in 2027.
“The continuation of the current precatório payment system has the potential to generate an unpayable stock, which would result in the need for a new moratorium”, said the AGU, according to a note released by the government.
Furthermore, says the AGU, the current situation “artificially masks the situation of public accounts, since expenses with postponed court orders are not included in the annual public debt statistics”.
VALUES
In the statement, the AGU states, based on information from the Ministry of Finance, that the total value of court orders issued and not paid is currently approximately 112 billion reais.
“Of these, only in relation to the accumulated and unpaid overdue liabilities, a debt of around 65 billion reais is estimated at the end of 2023. Add to this the portion that would be postponed in 2024 due to the subceiling (if the current system), of approximately 30 billion reais”, wrote the AGU.
“Thus, we arrive at a total value of approximately 95 billion reais in amounts that are not being paid due to the subceiling,” added the agency.
In its statement, the AGU requests that, if unconstitutionality is recognized, the government be authorized to open an extraordinary credit of 95 billion reais to settle the unpaid amounts due to the subceiling.
(Additional reporting by Marcela Ayres, in Brasília)
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