Minister Flávio Dino, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), ordered this Tuesday (27) that states and municipalities report within 30 days on the final beneficiaries of parliamentary amendments applied in the Emergency Program for the Resumption of the Events Sector (Perse). 
Failure to send information within the stipulated deadline “will lead to the adoption of appropriate coercive measures, without prejudice to the determination of the responsibility of omitted public agents”, warns the minister.
Dino is the rapporteur of a series of actions on parliamentary amendments, including so-called Pix amendmentsdirect transfers to the coffers of states and municipalities upon recommendation of a parliamentarian. In 2022, the Supreme Court decided that such amendments are unconstitutional and imposed a series of transparency and traceability criteria as a condition for the release of resources.
As responsible for the action, Dino now supervises the regularization of parliamentary amendments that still did not allow the final beneficiaries of the money to be identified. In this context, since March last year the minister has been seeking more information regarding the amendments applied to Perse, but always coming up against the lack of information from municipalities and states.
Failure to present previously required reports “compromises basic duties of transparency and traceability of resources arising from parliamentary amendments”, wrote the minister in this Tuesday’s decision.
The minister also highlighted that, of the information already received, some report tax waivers reaching R$34 million for a single company. In view of this, the failure of the municipalities and states involved to present clarifications is “a circumstance that proves to be even more serious given the large amounts involved in the form of tax waivers, which directly impact the balance of public accounts and the state’s own planning capacity”.
In March, Dino had ordered the Ministry of Tourism and the Attorney General’s Office (AGU) to collect all the necessary information to guarantee the traceability and transparency of the amendments directed to Perse. The bodies responded, however, that they could not comply with the decision, as they had not received the necessary reports from subnational entities.
Perse was created in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which paralyzed the events sector. Through the program, tax exemptions were granted to companies in the sector. After the end of the health emergency, however, the government had to enter into a dispute with Congress to discontinue the program.
