An analysis on the active transparency in websites of the Brazilian Federal Executive Power

Abstract

Government transparency in Brazil is ruled by the LAI - Law on Access to Information (Law no 12,527/2011) and Decree nº 7,724/2012. Nevertheless, this obligation has not been fully complied with by Brazilian public bodies. This scenario gave rise to a research aimed at investigating whether and how, currently, the Federal Executive Branch has complied with the principles of active transparency established by the legislation. In this sense, the problem that guided the investigation can be summarized in the following question: How have the public agencies of the Brazilian Federal Executive Branch complied with the guidelines for active transparency established by LAI and Decree 7,724/2012? In order to answer the question, a documentary research was carried out, taking as a corpus the electronic documents published on the websites of these federal agencies, from January to December 2016. The content of the sites was compared with the guidelines established by the law. The obtained results expose significant noncompliance with the guidelines for active transparency, such as the lack of disclosure of skills, hours of public service, organizational structure, among other items. The conclusion suggests the necessity of improving the analyzed sites.