The Committee for Amendments' Admissibility, which assists the General Rapporteur for the Budget, Senator Delcídio Amaral (PT-MS), decided not to approve nearly 1/4 of the amendments proposed by states' caucuses to the Yearly Budgeting Law (LOA). In total, 27 caucuses proposed 483 amendments and 118 were “not admitted”, according to the technical jargon, because of enouncing errors. In order not to risk to have their proposals out of the 2009 Budget, those caucuses were given a deadline of Friday (11/21) to correct these mistakes.
The report by the committee will be voted Tuesday (11/25) at the Mixed Budgeting Committee.

Most common errors
The most common problems were the direction of resources to state or local roads, which is prohibited by the prevailing Law of Annual Budget Regulations and Guidelines (LOD), and to works that are not previewed in the Multi-Yearly Plan (PPA), which is forbidden by the Constitution. Some generic amendments were also proposed, without a specific destination for a location or work, which is vetoed by the Resolution 1/06, which provides for works of the Budget Committee.

25 amendments by Committees of the Chamber and the Senate were also rejected. In this case, a frequent error was the deviation of thematic area. For instance, the Committee for Work, Administration and Public Service presented an amendment that would benefit with R$ 150 mil, a program for the qualification of tourism professionals, but this area belongs to the Committee for Tourism and Sports.

Expenses
In total, the Budgeting Bill received 9,362 amendments proposing expenses for 2009, which amount to R$ 66.5 billion. This does not mean, though, that these expenses will be actually realized, since they still need to be authorized by the General Rapporteur and by 10 sector rapporteurs. Last year, for instance, they amounted to R$ 62.6 billion, but the Budgeting Bill was approved with amendments amounting to only R$ 16.2 billion. And even not all of them have been authorized so far, since this authorization depends on political negotiations with the Executive.
The Cities´ Ministry received the most resources (R$ 9 billion), followed by the portfolios of Tourism and Transportation, with R$ 8.1 billion and R$ 6.3 billion, respectively. The Social Tourism Program in Brazil, that encompasses from tourist infrastructure to release events, and which received R$ 8.1 billion, received also the most resources among programs.

Report - Janary Júnior
Editing - João Pitella Junior