The payment of the compensatory license, a , has already cost at least R$819.3 million to the public coffers from July 2023 to October 2024, according to a report released by the NGO Transparência Brasil.
This type of arrangement allows judges to receive payments or time off as compensation, among other reasons, for the accumulation of duties.
The identified at least 35 courts that pay the benefit, with 3 out of every 5 magistrates in these bodies receiving the funds. On average, judges and judges earned an additional R$12,400 per month in the period analyzed, according to Transparência Brasil.
The benefit could increase the salary of magistrates by a third. The budget is not limited by the civil service ceiling, currently set at R$44,000 per month.
More than 8,700 magistrates received the license, with at least 4,200 accumulating more than R$100,000 in the period evaluated. “The champion is a judge from Pernambuco, with R$313.2 thousand between July 2023 and October 2024”, says Transparência Brasil.
The entity states that it is not possible to indicate the amount paid by , “due to the lack of standardization and low quality of data”.
The NGO also says that the value referring to the Judiciary is underreported, as the courts record the benefits in different ways, making analysis difficult. Even so, Transparência Brasil projects that, at the current rate, payments will exceed R$1 billion in 2025.
The report also considers the payment to be “without legal support” and says that the “remunerative nature of the benefit” was distorted in January 2023 by the CNMP (National Council of the Public Ministry). Some bodies of the Judiciary began to replicate the penduricalho, which gained scale among magistrates from July of that year, according to the report.
In October 2023, the (National Council of Justice) approved a path for Judiciary bodies to adopt the benefit, producing a cascade effect.
The president of the STF (Supreme Federal Court), said on the 9th that the Judiciary defended part of the trinkets paid to magistrates. He said that judges have the right to receive compensation when they accumulate a role or a collection of cases.
When contacted, the CNJ said that it only recognized what the Constitution already provides. “The rights and duties validly attributed to members of the judiciary or the Public Prosecutor’s Office apply to members of both careers, as applicable”, stated the council.
The report points out that 25 Union bodies, 21 of which are from the Labor Court, paid R$415 million in licenses in the period analyzed.
Another ten state courts, which guaranteed the benefit through laws approved in assemblies or internal acts, spent R$404 million.
“This new gimmick, without legal support, transformed the bonus into days off, enjoyed as money by members. In other words, the compensated sale of rest was allowed, in a maneuver to circumvent the ceiling”, states Transparência Brasil.
The Court of Justice of Paraná paid R$157.3 million, according to the report, and leads the total amount disbursed in compensatory licenses among the bodies analyzed. It then paid R$97.2 million, says the same analysis.
Following the CNJ decision, several bodies incorporated the benefits. The CJF (Federal Justice Council), for example, decided that judges who accumulate administrative functions or other “extraordinary procedural” activities will be entitled to “compensatory leave in the proportion of three days of work for one day of leave, limited to ten days per month”.
Judges who do not wish to take these days off, which can reach up to 120 days a year, receive payment, according to the benefit approved by the body.
In the report, Transparência Brasil also states that the “PL for super salaries”, bill 2721/2020, “removes these trinkets from the constitutional ceiling, going against its purpose of printing economy and rationality in civil servants’ paychecks”.
