The one that determines the Three Powers to immediately review and suspend payments without legal provision deals with a recurring feature of Brazilian public administration: the ability to produce exceptions that circumvent the rule and reorganize the distribution of income in the State itself.
When relevant portions of remuneration escape the public service and operate with low transparency, internal inequality in the public service is consolidated. Some careers convert institutional power into earnings above the threshold that should serve as a common reference.
The decision points to the proliferation of funds labeled as compensation which, in practice, function as a parallel salary and allow the ceiling of R$46,366.19 to be breached, corresponding to the allowance for STF ministers. In practice, the accounting label works as an instrument to generate external remuneration, partly with different tax treatment and less possibility of social control.
A study by estimated that expenses above the ceiling cost at least R$11.1 billion in 2023, in the Judiciary and the Public Ministry alone, and that 93% of magistrates received above the ceiling in the annual aggregate. In the Judiciary itself, spending on super salaries rose 49.3% from 2023 to 2024, reaching R$10.5 billion, at a rate much higher than inflation. The problem, in addition to the values, is the arrangement that institutionalizes exceptions, makes comparisons between careers difficult and weakens transparency about how remuneration is made up at the top.
Of course, eliminating hurdles does not solve the dynamics of public debt nor does it replace broader reforms, since the fiscal trajectory depends on growth, the quality of spending and the interest rate. The relevance lies in interrupting a type of concentrated expenditure protected by opacity, which works as a remuneration shortcut.
The mechanism also creates perverse incentives; After all, when a relevant part of income depends on exceptions and corporate disputes, the system signals that the route to increasing remuneration is less through the provision of services and more through bargaining capacity. This shifts energy to lobbying, judicialization and benefit engineering.
The consequence is a State that better remunerates those who manage to put pressure on it, while at the same time preserving a gray area that is difficult to audit, compare and explain to the taxpayer. Therefore, the distance produced by this arrangement is not limited to the public nor the private sector. It is internal; separates careers with high pressure power from the majority of civil servants who work under strict rules and effective caps.
The injunction carries political weight as it occurs amid the repercussions of. None of the Powers supports a discourse of responsibility when it normalizes salary shortcuts in its own house, especially when constructed with technical language that makes supervision difficult. If the decision succeeds, its merit will be to replace limits where they have become ornaments and stop the naturalization of a remunerative elite that lives above the ceiling and, often, beyond the reach of taxes and scrutiny.
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