Transparency in Administrative Contracts: Evaluation of the Portals of Brazilian Federal Universities.
Administrative Contracts. Social Control. Democracy. Public Transparency. Federal Universities.
Administrative contracts started to be used on a larger scale by Federal Universities, due to the extinction of public positions and the need to hire third parties to replace them, due to the reforms implemented by the State in the 1990s. These changes in the ways of public management were also impacted by advances in legislation that required the transparency of the Brazilian Public Administration (APB) and regulated the exercise of social control, based on the Access to Information Law (BRASIL, 2011). For the fulfillment of these legal determinations, the advances in Information Technology were fundamental, as it enabled full disclosure of data on administrative contracts on APB Official Portals on the internet (SANTOS et al., 2016). Despite this, the level of transparency in the Portals of Federal Universities, has not corresponded to the legal requirements, in order to guarantee a democratic and participatory environment (BRASIL, 2018B; SANTOS L., 2017; PESSÔA, 2013). Based on this context, it was defined as the general objective of this research to verify the level of transparency in the provision of information on administrative contracts on the electronic portals of Brazilian Federal Universities. The relevance of this theme is due to the fact that the volume of public resources used in this form of contracting has been progressively increased, reaching 15% of GDP in developed countries (REIS, 2015) and 40% of the volume of discretionary expenditures by IFES (MIRANDA, 2018). The analysis and discussion of the results obtained, based on the model developed for this research, allowed to show that the level of transparency of administrative contracts in the Portals of the 63 Federal Universities are still insufficient to guarantee the full exercise of social control and inspection by the agencies of control.