Senators and specialists debated this Monday (22) the so-called Proposal for Amendment to the Constitution (PEC) of Precatório (PEC 23/2021), which divides the payment of precatório and changes the rules of the Public Spending Ceiling. According to the federal government, the proposal will make room for the payment, by the end of 2022, of the Auxílio Brasil program — a social benefit that replaces Bolsa Família.
According to the budget secretary of the Ministry of Economy, Esteves Colnago, the original text of the PEC, sent by the Executive Branch, provided for a ceiling for the payment of court orders and paid in installments the payment of court orders that are left over after this ceiling is reached. When proceeding in the Chamber, federal deputies ended the possibility of this installment and created a limit for this payment calculated retroactively since 2016. According to Colnago, the PEC will ensure the maintenance of the spending ceiling.
Alternative text
Senators José Aníbal (PSDB-SP), Oriovisto Guimarães (Podemos-PR) and Alessandro Vieira (Cidadania-SE) also participated in the debate. The three presented, together, a text to replace PEC 23/2021. According to Aníbal, their proposal makes it possible to pay Brazil Aid and “prevents the government from defaulting on precatório”. For this, the text places the R$ 89 billion in court orders that the federal government has to pay in 2022 outside the limit of the spending ceiling.
Aníbal explained that, currently, 85% of the court orders to be paid are social security and labor debts of small and medium value. Senator Oriovisto Guimarães, on the other hand, stated that the alternative proposal does away with the so-called rapporteur amendments in the Budget, prevents the default of court orders, preserves the ceiling rules and seeks to make Brazil Aid a permanent program.
Snowball
For the director of the Independent Fiscal Institution (IFI), Felipe Salto, the recalculation of the spending ceiling, as approved by the Chamber, is an “untimely and untimely” change. Salto highlighted that, according to IFI calculations, the PEC will generate “a kind of snowball”, accumulating the postponed court orders and could total more than R$ 800 billion at the end of 2026.
“This solution, of changing the ceiling to open up fiscal space, is very bad, because it leads to a loss of credibility, it is a change that has no technical basis,” he said.
In the Fiscal Monitoring Report published on Wednesday (17), the Independent Fiscal Institution warned that “the retroactive change in the way of correcting the spending ceiling would, in practice, be the end of the rule as it was conceived”. And that, even before the vote on the PEC in the Senate, “the effects on the macroeconomic scenario are already being felt” due to the increase in uncertainty.
PEC vote
The president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), said on Monday that, in two weeks, the PEC dos Precatórios could be voted on in the House’s plenary. Before going to plenary, the text is still needs to be analyzed by the Constitution and Justice Commission (CCJ), this Wednesday (24).
In a lecture at the São Paulo Trade Association (ACSP), in the city of São Paulo, Pacheco emphasized that the obligation to pay court orders is unquestionable and that, for this reason, the issue and the solution to the problem were so discussed.
*With information from the Senate Agency
