Brazil's Federal Court of Accounts
Insight and Foresight for Better Governance
Brazil’s Federal Court of Accounts, the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), is seeking to go beyond its traditional oversight role and help improve policy formulation, implementation and evaluation. This report identifies ways TCU can achieve this by applying principles of good governance to areas such policy coherence, strategic and long-term budgeting, internal control and risk management, and monitoring and evaluation. It suggests concrete steps TCU can take to adapt its own strategies, approaches and audit programming to provide valuable insight and foresight to policy makers in the centre of government. In this way, it can help ensure that policies and programmes are forward looking and based on evidence.
Auditing for more strategic and sustainable budgeting in Brazil
Guided by OECD’s Recommendation of the Council on Budgetary Governance, this chapter promotes action that Brazil’s supreme audit institution, the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), can take to encourage more sustainable and strategic budgeting over the long-term. In particular, this chapter looks at Brazil’s budgetary structure with respect to four key trends that have emerged amongst OECD member countries in the last decade, including: (i) integration of medium-term perspectives in the budget, (ii) the integration of performance information into, evaluation and value-for-money into the budget, (iii) strengthening of fiscal discipline and (iv) long-term fiscal sustainability. Recommendations are made to TCU as to how to support improvements in each area through its audit and advisory work.