Minas is the state that reserves the most resources for amendments by state deputies

State deputies from Minas Gerais are the Brazilian parliamentarians who took up the largest amount of resources from the state budget for the execution of mandatory amendmentsthose that the Executive branch is obliged to execute in the year of approval, regardless of negotiation.

The data comes from a survey carried out by the NGO Transparency International Brazil and compared information collected in all Brazilian States, at the end of 2023. According to the organization, the expectation is that taxpayers’ spending on tax amendments will continue to increase, which demands attention from the population.

In Minas Gerais, more than R$2.3 billion were reserved for parliamentarians’ projects and mandatory execution by the state administration, defined in the mandatory amendments. A value that gives calm leadership to the people of Minas Gerais, who have almost double the resources reserved for the state deputies of São Paulo, second place in the ranking, with R$1.2 billion for this type of mandatory amendment.

The explanation, according to Gabriella Costa, a researcher at Transparência Internacional Brasil, is that the miners were quick to incorporate into state legislation changes made to the constitution, increasing the spending limit on tax amendments, which previously was 1.2% and increased to 2%. of the previous year’s net current revenues.

“What happens is that the State of Minas Gerais was faster than the others. They had already been quicker to incorporate the mandatory amendments and then they were quicker to adopt this constitutional change at the federal level, which started to allow the 2% limit for individual amendments in December 2022. Months later (in April 2024), the The state of Minas Gerais also made this change to its constitution, allowing an increase in spending to 1.5% and reaching 2% in 2025”, says the expert.

The research called “X-Ray of Parliamentary Amendments to the Budget – State Level”, prepared by Transparency International – Brazil, with support from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, showed that in total, in the country, around R$ 9.4 billion were reserved for mandatory amendments approved in state legislatures.

Each federation unit follows its own rules for dividing resources between deputies. In Minas Gerais, the value of the amendments is divided equally between parliamentarians, with 50% of the resources to which each one is entitled must be allocated to the health area.

For the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais (ALMG), the values ​​for amendments, although high compared to other States, do not imply losses for the population. In a note, the Minas Gerais parliament stated that “the fact that they are mandatory makes the amendments increasingly effective, in addition to increasingly guaranteeing the independence of the Legislature”.

“Deputies are public managers with a constant presence in all regions of the State and, therefore, identify problems and needs that often do not even come to the attention of the government, such as renovations to public equipment, schools, construction of artesian wells, acquisition of hospital materials, among other demands”, states ALMG.
Weakened government

The high value of tax amendments in Minas Gerais created a bottleneck for the Romeu Zema (Novo) government. The more resources deputies have guaranteed under this heading, the less dependence they have on the federal government, as highlighted by professor Adriano Gianturco, from Ibmec-BH. “It allows them (parliamentarians) to offer something concrete to their voters, such as works. It reduces dependence and frees legislators to act and be accountable for their mandates”, highlights the professor.

A practical effect of this “independence” was felt by the state government in early April, when the governor’s leaders in the Legislative Assembly saw the opposition block the Legislative agenda because the government was unable to mobilize the government base and reach the minimum number of deputies necessary to vote on the governor’s vetoes.

“A month ago, the House did not vote on anything and the base and the opposition responded (to the call). I want to thank you both. Not because they voted for or against, but because they were present, after all we were elected to vote”, said the government leader, João Magalhães (MDB) at the time.

If the difficulty exists even to vote on vetoes that are of less interest to the government, it increases even more when the issue involves controversial projects, which are in the interest of the government, but which can create discomfort among voters, as is the case with the Recovery Regime Fiscal (RRF), which has been stuck in the Minas Gerais Assembly since 2019, despite several efforts by the Zema government to carry out the vote and is now in the fridge awaiting negotiations in Brasília.

Transparency

However, since the amendments were incorporated into the budget as mandatory in 2018, this type of resource reservation has received criticism for lack of transparency and doubts about the allocation of the amounts.

The change made in 2023, increasing the spending limit on tax amendments to 2%, was the result of pressure from federal deputies on the Lula (PT) government, after the Federal Supreme Court (STF) banned “rapporteur amendments” , which became known as the “secret budget”, under the argument that it lacked transparency and left loopholes for irregular use of public money.

For Transparency International, this problem exists in several state Assemblies, but, in the case of Minas Gerais, the situation is even better than other units of the federation.

“In relation to other states, Minas has made important advances. There is a portal (emendas.mg.gov.br) that brings the portfolio of amendments, the schedule and data on amendments since 2019, as well as reports. But there is no, let’s say, easily accessible language. They are spreadsheets, which is good, but they require a certain type of knowledge to navigate between the data”, highlights Gabriella Costa, a researcher at the organization.

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