The Federal Court of Auditors report obtained by Estadão last week indicated 29,700 cultural promotion projects without analyzed financial statements, totaling 22 billion reais in public funds without verified allocation.
THE Ministry of Culture of the federal government published this Sunday 21 a new position concerning a report published by Stadium on Thursday 18. The article covered a technical report from the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) which indicates that the department has 22 billion reais in unsupervised accounts and controls deadlines using Excel.
In a note, the ministry specifies that the TCU report would be “preliminary” and “does not include relevant and up-to-date information”. “The mentioned liability of BRL 22 billion refers to projects of past administrations, with the responsibility of the previous government, which neglected supervision and masked the real volume of ongoing processes,” it is clarified.
Understand the case
According to information from a preliminary TCU report published on November 18, 2025 – and obtained exclusively by Estadão – the Ministry of Culture has accumulated 29,700 cultural promotion projects without analyzed financial statements, totaling 22 billion reais in public funds without verified allocation. The report speaks of a “chronic problem” and a “generalized lack of governance”.
“Despite the latest actions adopted by the ministry to reduce the backlog of files, the final balance of liability obligations awaiting analysis has increased over the last fifteen years,” underlines the TCU. There was also a “chronic non-compliance” with analysis deadlines due to the absence of internal mechanisms for this control. Judicial technicians also detected that limitation periods were controlled via “a manually populated Excel spreadsheet”.
The tool was deemed useless by auditors because the spreadsheet ignores notifications and progress that restarts the deadline. In other words: the system may indicate that the debt has expired, when in reality the government would still have legal time to collect it. Furthermore, employees of the Ministry of Culture demonstrated that they “did not know the difference between intercurrent and five-year prescriptions”.
Additionally, new rules created by the ministry removed detailed financial analysis from most projects, causing the failure rate for irregularities to drop to zero in 2024. The changes affect projects made possible by laws such as Rouanet, Paulo Gustavo and Aldir Blanc. For the ministry, the measures aim to “reduce bureaucracy, agility and the valorization of cultural results” and align with the new Regulatory Framework for the Promotion of Culture.
Read the full note from the Ministry of Culture
Discover below the note published by the Ministry of Culture this Sunday 21.
“The Ministry of Culture specifies that the report of the State of São Paulo is based on a preliminary and confidential report from the TCU, which does not incorporate the relevant and updated information already provided by the ministry as part of the adversarial process. Publication, when based on incomplete data, can lead the reader to erroneous interpretations.
It is imperative to clarify that the mentioned liability of 22 billion reais refers to projects of past administrations, under the direct responsibility of the previous government, which neglected supervision and masked the real volume of the processes underway. Attempting to associate this historical liability with current management is a misleading distortion of reality.
The current management, on the contrary, has assumed responsibilities as a top priority and implemented structuring measures that have resulted in the analysis of the largest number of accountability processes in the history of the organization, setting historical records from 2024.
Our commitment is transparency and the proper use of resources, the modernization of cultural policy and the resolution of inherited administrative chaos. The new development model is fully aligned with the application of the regulatory framework law for the promotion of culture, strengthening legal certainty and control of results, without relaxing control.
The Ministry of Culture reaffirms its responsible action to resolve responsibilities and ensure that public resources are used with maximum legality and transparency.
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