Fábio Medina Osório, for “O Tempo”: “Fighting corruption in real time”
Article in 'O Tempo', of 03/01/2019, on combating corruption and inefficiency by the newly elected governments.
Translated from the original.
The new governments undertook important commitments, beginning with the fight against corruption and the endemic inefficiency that contaminates the public machinery. It is no coincidence that the renewal was radical, electing candidates who defended liberal discourse in the economy, tough in the security sector and austere in public finances.
Society finally demonstrated repudiation of demagoguery, populism and dirty records. Those who privileged authenticity were rewarded, presenting government programs compatible with the population’s most urgent aspirations.
Some structuring pillars of the new times were identified: combating corruption, economic efficiency and containing urban violence. But the greatest source of waste of public resources lies in administrative incompetence, a bottleneck that represents a permanent opportunity for acts of corruption.
Transplanting private-sector efficiency paradigms is a necessary but insufficient step. Encouraging meritocracy, producing reforms, understanding the logic of the public and the private, studying comparative models and perceiving the differences, all of this is indispensable to strengthen anti-corruption mechanisms and foster corporate governance, risk management and compliance (internal prevention).
There are international treaties that must be observed in public and private relations, but they are rarely observed in countries like Brazil, where legal uncertainty still prevails, regrettably.
Relations between the public and the private are still opaque in Brazil, allowing favoritism. The oversight institutions that act on the same fact, but in light of different criteria, are in conflict. The control model needs to be rethought, so that national and international investors have a more predictable agenda.
Brazil's adherence to normative commitments to fight corruption induces the idea of economic growth and of a very strong wave of investment in Brazil and in the States aligned with the same mindset as the federal government. This need stems from a historic wave dating back to the 1960s, whose beginning has its origins in the FCPA (the U.S. Anti-Corruption Law for foreign relations), which radiates irreversibly to the international universe.
Similar legislation emerged in other countries, so that global business came under this inevitable economic and legal logic. At the same time, control institutions began to cooperate in real time, using advanced technologies and artificial intelligence, reaching transnational wrongdoing at digital speed.
In these new times, society gains greater room for oversight and participation in order to control rulers. And it is not a phenomenon restricted to Brazil, but a global one. That is why ideologies also melt away, with more pragmatic discourse prevailing, geared to meeting society’s concrete needs.
Fábio Medina Osório is a lawyer and former minister of the AGU (Office of the Attorney General of the Union)