At 20:52 on New Year’s Day I’m answering an email written in capital letters and bold. “We need VOLUNTEERS! And YOU can help us!” It’s the Observatório Social de São José, looking for people to check town hall websites against the access to information law.
There’s a checklist, an estimate of five hours, and a table of fifteen towns with an empty column for the volunteer’s name. I ask for the first two on the list, Faxinal dos Guedes and Fraiburgo, two towns I have never set foot in. Jaime, the president of the observatory, answers “HAPPY AND BLESSED 2014!!!” and I’m in.
The responsible adult who lives in my headFive hours, Diego. On the first day of the year. For a spreadsheet.
The checklist is a spreadsheet with 202 yes or no questions, and my favorite part is the last column. Its header asks you to leave a note if you “didn’t understand the question” or “don’t know the technical term”. Somebody knew exactly who would be filling this in.
I use that column a lot. Budget commitments, settlements, payments carried over from the year before… every cell I’m not sure about gets painted purple. By question 7 I’m lost for a different reason, because question 7 is question 1 again (and 8 is 2). When I email Jaime that 12 and 18 are the same question too, he answers that they’ll report it to the prosecutors, who wrote the checklist. Has any town passed yet? Not yet.
And then I can’t stop
On the second night the checklist stops being the point. One name keeps showing up in Faxinal’s expenses with numbers way bigger than everything around it… “Betha Sistemas”, a software company from Criciúma (another city state).
I go looking for the tender behind it and then for the contract behind the tender, and by ten at night the browser has so many tabs that I can’t read their titles anymore, half from one transparency portal and half from the other.
At 21:24 I send Jaime an excited email about a tender that lasted a single day with a single bidder, and half an hour later I’m telling a friend this must be how intelligence cops feel, hahaha. My next email to Jaime starts with “Sorry to bother you again”, because I’ve just learned that tenders lasting 15 minutes are completely normal (Oooops). It has the better find in it, though.
The milk
The contract from that tender is R$136,964 for one year of renting software to a town of about ten thousand people. I scroll down the items. Accounting, payroll, taxes, the health fund… and then items 18 and 19.
Water, and long life whole milk in a Tetra Pak, R$840 each, the same price as the health fund’s purchasing module. A liter of long life milk costs around R$2.50 at the supermarket, so that’s more than 300 liters of milk, or twelve cartons at R$70 each (some very fancy milk). A few rows down there’s food and lodging for the support staff and 5,000 units of travel reimbursement (kilometers, I hope). I add up the 24 prices twice and they come to exactly R$136,964, so the milk is inside the contract.
Two portals that don’t agree
The city hall’s site links to one transparency portal, SIACI, made by CIASC, the state’s IT company. The town council’s site links to another one, Fly Transparência, made by… Betha.
Item 7 of the contract is the “Portal Transparência” module, so the company I’m reading about rents the town the website I’m using to read about it.
And the two portals tell different stories. The milk only exists in the CIASC one. The city hall’s news says a software tender was cancelled because its own staff would do the work, while Betha’s contract points to a 2012 tender I can’t find anywhere. On both portals the export button doesn’t work, so the numbers can be looked at but not taken anywhere.
By the 3rd I’m comparing what other towns paid Betha in 2013, as amateur as it gets. Criciúma, Betha’s hometown, paid over R$1.2 million, and support and consulting could explain part of the differences, which I say in the email. Still, São José, the observatory’s own city, has almost twenty times Faxinal’s people and paid about a tenth of what Faxinal paid.
Show the numbers
| Town | People (2010) | Paid to Betha (2013) | Per resident |
|---|---|---|---|
| Faxinal dos Guedes | 10,661 | R$130,000 | R$12.19 |
| Criciúma | 192,305 | R$1,200,000 | R$6.24 |
| Fraiburgo | 34,556 | R$27,000 | R$0.78 |
| São José | 209,804 | R$14,000 | R$0.07 |
At lunchtime on the 3rd I send the checklist back with only two cells still purple. Question 53 asks if the official site guarantees the authenticity and integrity of what it publishes, so under the checklist I write:
Do these portals guarantee authenticity and integrity? :(
I don’t know if anybody in Faxinal drank that milk. It could be a real purchase, or two lines picked from the wrong catalog when someone typed the tender in. The observatory says they want to compare software prices between towns of the same size soon. I was supposed to be done in five hours, and the tabs are still open, hehehe…
Updates
Update 1, 28 February 2014. The certificate arrived. Eight hours of relevant volunteer service, from 1 to 7 January. Officially.
Update 2, 8 March 2014. A friend asked me about the checklist for an idea he’s entering in a Google social impact challenge, and I wrote him a much longer email than this post. My favorite line in it is “I knew software factories had a reputation for working like bakeries, but not literally” (Brazilian bakeries sell milk). I told him anyone could run this checklist on their own town hall if it were a bit friendlier, and confessed that before January I didn’t understand a thing about tenders. “It was transformative”, I wrote, which sounds dramatic for a spreadsheet, but it was.
Update 3, 13 November 2016. Still at it, now with the new council members of Florianópolis: who’s on their payroll?