Spending Reimbursements for Brazilian Politicians (2009–2017)
Growing up in Brazil, I’ve heard about the outrages that permeate our politics my entire life. And, despite being somewhat apolitical, it has always amazed me how much some of the politicians back home seem not to care about anything.
It is well known that Brazilian politicians usually rejoice of certain privileges, and, among them, are reimbursements for a variety of different goods and services they purchase. All of this data, despite being very unsupervised, is still public. We will take a deep dive into the spending reimbursements for Brazil’s deputies in the “Chamber of Deputies” and see if our politicians were really respecting public money.
Total spending on reimbursements is on the rise:
We can also visualize the proportions of what kinds of good and services our representatives have been asking for refunds most often:
Political Parties: which ones are the greatest spenders?
Let’s take a look at the party that spends the most each year:
The chart below tells another part of the tale… In a country with a whopping 30+ political parties, we observe that almost half of payments go out to 5 parties, and, coincidentally or not, are some of the ones who possess scary influence, power, and have the deepest roots in recent corruption scandals.
However, we must also take into account that these are two of the largest parties in terms of representatives. How about some of the smaller parties? A quick look at the data shows that even the smaller parties have aggregate amounts of refund that are truly unbelievable.
Deputies: a closer look at spending
I think with the graph above we see a very picture. Aside from the high salaries and other privileges, deputies have been spending on AVERAGE over R$ 200 thousand each every year for largely personal use, but that gets reimbursed to them with very little monitoring. It is a clear way to game the system.
….
If you are Brazilian and voted in the elections over the last years, are any of the names on the left familiar? Unfortunately, the list of big spenders continues on and on…
By the time the next elections come up, make sure you pay attention if your favorite politician is respectful with your tax money. Remember mandates last at least 4 years…
Oddities and the Absurd…
Finally, I’d like to show some of the most extreme cases and weird expenses that have showed up over the years. I hope this sheds light onto the lack of respect many of the Brazilian politicians have for the people and especially taxpayer’s money.
- “Dissemination of Parliament Activity”
To me, this is one of those things that I find outrageous. Political parties have a huge propaganda and political party advertising budget, that comes from the federal government. However, a quick look at the data shows that millions more are spent every year, and reimbursed personally to the deputies for additional propaganda, prints, etc…
2. Flights
Not once, not twice, but THREE times have Brazilian politicians been reimbursed for 1000+ flights within the span of ONE YEAR. Needless to say something is wrong, unless Mr. Andrada and Mr. Picciani take more than three flights every single day of the year.
Further analysis can look into spending patterns of different states. I chose to look at the 4 most economically developed states in Brazil. Below are the spending patterns on flights:
From this visualization, it becomes very clear that on average, plane tickets are around R$500-R$1000 for most of our representatives, but when you consider DF, the nation’s capital, you notice that there average expenses on flights are considerably higher. We cannot tell if this is the case because tickets are bought in a rush, or if they demand more comfort in the flights, but in either case the politicians from our capital seem to not care as much.
3. Postal Spending
Another weird spending can be related to postal services and mail. Unlike the US, the postal system in Brazil is less efficient and not as useful. It would be hard to imagine our politicians have so much mail expenses, and much less that they would ask for refunds on them…
But, the story is the same, thousands and thousands of R$ spent annually on mail and, leading the list, is our current president Mr. Jair Bolsonaro, who managed to be refunded on a total of R$876 thousand over 9 years only on mail and postal services, and this was only up to 2017, before he ran for president. See below some of the greatest spenders on mail:
4. Fuels and Lubricants
This one is particularly interesting. For reference, a 50 liter tank (approximately 13 gallons) will cost today on average in a big city about R$250 to be completely filled. Keep this number in mind…
First, let’s look at the chart below. It shows the average spending on “fuels and lubricants” at gas stations. They still seem kind of high, and would imply our deputies would be pretty much refilling completely empty tanks every time, but we’ll give them a pass for now…
Now, let’s investigate a little further. A quick summary statistic of standard deviation reveals the numbers to the left. This made me wonder… this standard deviation looks kinda high…
This makes, me think… what if we filter the small values and look at high spending at gas stations, say above R$5000 (around $1000 dollars). Well, here are the results:
First, I looked at the top 10 parties on mean average fuel spending, and computed two other features: “count” and “max”. Max refers the maximum receipt and fuel, and we can see those figures are insane (unless they are now requesting refunds on fueling their private yachts or war tanks…). “Count” refers to the number of times deputies from that party have requested refunds on fueling for more than R$5000… I mean, am I the only one who thing something sketchy is going on?
Conclusions
In this *quick* exploration of our representatives’ spending habits, I uncovered so much that I am frankly in awe, and it seems like the surface has barely been scratched. There is a lot more I could investigate (and probably will at some point!). I hope, if you are a foreigner, that this has shed some light into why may of us Brazilians have lost faith in our politicians, and if you are a national like me, this serves as motivation to dig deeper into our voting choices and stand up for what we deserve.
There is so much more that can be done!
Thank you for reading, stay safe and have a great week!
Data Sources
Data from: https://www.kaggle.com/epattaro/brazils-house-of-deputies-reimbursements?select=deputies_dataset.csv
All of this data is public and available through the government’s website on: https://www2.camara.leg.br/transparencia/cota-para-exercicio-da-atividade-parlamentar/dados-abertos-cota-parlamentar