Brazil: The Transparency Portal of the Federal Government

In 2004, the Brazilian Government launched its Transparency Portal (“Portal da Transparência”), a website dedicated to the provision of detailed information on the revenues and expenditures of the Federal government. It is a key component of Brazil’s national digital strategy. By 2015, the Portal held nearly two billion data entries, totaling nearly five trillion U.S. dollars in payments and transfers to nearly 35 million people and 660,000 legal entities, and had reached a mark of more than one million accesses per month. The case analyzes the Brazilian e-government and transparency policies that led to the Portal’s creation. It provides a detailed description of the Portal’s goals, structure, management, and content, as well as an overview of the drivers that led to its implementation, such as the legal framework and the necessity to fight corruption, and the challenges faced by the government’s implementation team, such as political disputes and the difficulty in reaching the public. Although the Portal is an internationally recognized model of digital government policy, it could still be improved by further integration of datasets, by using more accessible language and visualization tools, and by adding functionalities, which would improve the Portal’s use as a tool for the management of public policies.