By: Klauss Nogueira

Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) have increasingly expanded their role beyond legal compliance and administrative regularity to improve public policies and the quality of services delivered to society. Despite this evolution, many audits still focus on bureaucratic processes, governance structures, and institutional indicators, without fully capturing how public-sector shortcomings affect citizens’ daily lives.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector has placed Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) at a new frontier of oversight. Amid promises of increased efficiency and significant risks to ethics, transparency, and accountability, the role of SAIs demands technical discernment and institutional autonomy.

In 2023, the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), the SAI of Brazil, issued 137 decisions containing deliberations for its jurisdictional units. These decisions generated 1,110 items subject to monitoring, including determinations and recommendations. Monitoring the implementation and impact of these deliberations is a process as important as the audits themselves, demanding a considerable effort from the SAI’s resources.

This article presents a methodology to assess the effective transparency of information published on public entities’ portals. It considers not only the mere availability of information but also quality requirements of information, such as timeliness, completeness, conciseness, accuracy, clarity, reliability, accessibility, and relevance.