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.
Strengthening the contributions of TCU to good governance in Brazil
Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) face a demanding auditing environment, where governance challenges persist and consistently present new risks. In this context, SAIs must remain flexible and responsive to changes and emerging risks in their own planning and auditing. This chapter explores opportunities for the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), Brazil’s SAI, to make improvements to its own strategy and operations in order to more effectively contribute to good governance in Brazil. This includes a greater focus on the institutional characteristics that position TCU to better support the policy cycle – formulation, implementation and evaluation – with evidenced-based solutions and insights that focus on long-term policy outcomes. This chapter explores steps that TCU can take to ensure it systematically upholds the principles of good governance in its own work, including its strategies, audit programming and internal mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation.