Brazil’s government on Monday asked the Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional a bill approved in 2021 that imposed an annual cap and staggered the payments of court-ordered debts until 2026.
In 2021, during the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Congress approved a bill that lifted its spending ceiling and staggered the payment of court-ordered debt in order to clear space for welfare spending ahead of the presidential election.
The country’s solicitor general’s office said in a letter to the Supreme Court that the measures approved created “mandatory expenses with an estimated additional cost of 41 billion reais per year.”
The annual cap for the payment of court-ordered bills created “a significant and growing volume of artificially repressed expenditure”, to be paid only in 2027, it said in the letter.
In addition, the solicitor general’s office said the current scenario “artificially masks the situation of public accounts, since expenses with postponed court-ordered payments are not included in the annual public debt statistics.”
