Addressing Fragmentation, Overlap and Duplication in the Brazilian Government: An Approach for TCU

Resumo

The TCU continuously seeks to develop methods to identify opportunities and promote greater budgetary efficiency. This is particularly critical as Brazil attempts to improve and expand government services under the spending limits established under the 2017 Constitutional Amendment. This Paper focuses on assessing the possibility of using GAO’s approach to identify and report on fragmentation, overlap and duplication (FOD) among government goals and activities, and it will explore two groups of issues: (1) how the TCU might include FOD in its audits; and (2) how the TCU might report founded FOD cases on a consolidated annual report. Nine actions are proposed to help the Court overcome challenges to include FOD reviews in its Report on Government Policies and Programs (RePP). These proposals include the establishment of general guidelines, a guide on identifying and conducting performance audits addressing FOD, redefinition of the RePP’s content and experimentation of new approaches for leveraging TCU’s performance, based on practices of so-called Exponential Organizations. This Paper also registers some resources that the TCU could consider to implement recommended actions, including its own experience in a previous audit in 2016.