A inelegibilidade decorrente de rejeição de contas por irregularidade insanável que configure ato doloso de improbidade administrativa: análise do fenômeno nas eleições municipais de 2016 do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The present article aims at examining whether the decisions of the Rio Grande do Sul State Court of Auditors, as regards the issuance of unfavorable prior opinions and judgment of accounting irregularities, effectively resulted in the ineligibility of those involved and that are candidates in the 2016 elections, as judgments of the Electoral Justice. State Courts of Auditors are bodies that support the Legislative Branch on public accounting, financial and budgetary inspections. The core competencies of them are issuing of prior opinion on the annual accountability of the head of the Executive Power, as well as the judgment of managers’ and officers’ accounts who are responsible for public money, goods and values. To prevent the exercise of elective positions by bad administrators, the legislation has defined on the art. 1, I, g, of Complementary Law No. 64/1990, that the rejection of accounts gives reason to ineligibility, preventing convicted managers to run for elective offices for a period of eight years after the decision of the competent body. In order to check whether the decisions about the accounts’ irregularities have resulted in ineligibility within the Rio Grande do Sul State, it was obtained, first, the managers issuance list with unfavorable prior opinion and accounts deemed irregular by the Rio Grande do Sul State Court of Auditors in the past eight years. Later, it was found in the Electoral Court systems, which of these managers were candidates in the 2016 elections and the situation of their application records. Finally, the entire content of the judgments has been analyzed in order to verify the reasons for the acceptance or rejection of each application. The methodology of this study was the documentary approach with quantitative characteristic, applied, exploratory and documental. As results it was found that from a total of 81 managers with irregularities by the TCE-RS and who wanted to be candidates in the 2016 elections, only 20 were declared ineligible because of their accounts judgement, corresponding to 24.69% of the total. One of the main factors that led to this situation is the prerogative of the City Councils to judge the Executive Heads (Mayors), which, as a rule, approve the accounts of the managers involved despite the existence of an unfavorable opinion by the State Court of Auditors. Even in cases that the Legislative Power rejects the accounts, it is common the occurrence of failures in the trial, which cause their suspension or cancellation by the Judiciary Branch. In addition, there are several cases that the application is not impugned despite the rejection of the accounts, which can be partially explained by the extremely short time of five days from the date of the registration application and the impugnment.