O desafio de obrigar os governos a aplicarem a verba legalmente devida em educação: os casos das prefeituras fluminenses do Rio de Janeiro, Niterói e São Gonçalo

Abstract

The article discusses one of the main problems of education funding in Brazil, which is the noncomplianceby governments of a constitutional article requiring a certain amount to be spent oneducation, said amount comprising a minimum percentage of taxes (18% in the case of the federalgovernment and 25% in the case of State and municipal governments), plus additional funds fully linkedto education, such as the gain with the Federal Fund known as Fundef (and, starting in 2007, with the newFund known as Fundeb), the “salário-educação” and other extra funds. Such non-compliance is based onthe cases of the expenses of the municipalities of Rio de Janeiro between 1998 and 2004, of São Gonçaloin 2005 and of the education budget of Niterói for 2007. Basically, the non-compliance is due to theincorrect calculation of education-linked funds and the wrong classification of expenses as maintenanceand development of education (MDE), as defined in the Brazilian Federal Law on Education. The cityadministration of Rio de Janeiro, for example, mistakenly included its gain with the Fundef (about R$ 2.5billions between 1998 and 2004) in the calculation of the minimum percentage of taxes, when the correctprocedure would be to add said gain to the amount corresponding to such percentage. The city of Niterói,in turn, has not considered the “salário-educação” as an education-linked revenue. In the classification ofeducational expenses, a common mistake is to pay retired educational personel with the revenue linked toMDE, which, in the case of Rio de Janeiro, amounted to over R$ 400 million in 2004. A similarirregularity was practised by the city of São Gonçalo, which, in addition, failed to use about R$ 10million from the “salário-educação”.