巴西法官薪酬超上限243亿雷亚尔，中资企业税务合规风险上升

Sérgio Guedes-Reis Divulgação Brazil paid R$24.3 billion above its constitutional public-sector salary cap in 2025, with judges and other elite legal careers accounting for 94% of the excess, according to research highlighted by the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Brazilian Institute of Economics (FGV Ibre). The findings show how a constitutional ceiling intended to constrain public-sector pay has effectively become a floor for many members of Brazil’s legal elite, with allowances and other benefits pushing compensation far beyond the limit. When institutions can—and cannot—reform themselves National Justice Council hardens penalties for judges The lies Supreme Court justices tell The research was conducted by political scientist Sérgio Guedes-Reis, a finance and control analyst at Brazil’s Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) and a researcher at the University of California, San Diego. His work provided the basis for FGV Ibre’s monthly policy letter. According to Guedes-Reis, 67,300 public-sector employees received compensation above the constitutional cap in 2025. Of those, 48,600 belonged to elite legal careers—judges, prosecutors, government attorneys and public defenders. Together, they received R$22.8 billion in excess, accounting for 94% of the total excess. “Guedes-Reis’s research and proposal point to a way of addressing a critical issue in Brazil’s fiscal restructuring,” FGV Ibre Director Luiz Guilherme Schymura wrote in the institute’s monthly letter, obtained in advance by Valor. “Maintaining exceptionally high public-sector pay undermines from the outset any attempt to address Brazil’s structural fiscal imbalance that requires cutting benefits for less privileged groups,” he wrote. A 2003 constitutional amendment established that no public employee should earn more than a Supreme Court justice, whose salary stood at R$46,366 per month, or about R$630,000 per year in 2025. Two decades later, Guedes-Reis says that ceiling has effectively become the floor for elite legal careers. “We know this is a longstanding issue, but the data show a process that is advancing rapidly,” he said. Allowances, seniority bonuses, unused leave converted into cash and representation payments are among the forms of compensation classified as non-salary benefits that can circumvent the cap. According to Guedes-Reis’s research, 85.1% of judges received compensation above the ceiling, as did 89.1% of prosecutors, 72.2% of public defenders and 52.8% of government attorneys. The figures include active and retired public employees as well as pension beneficiaries. “In practice, the only people who don’t earn above the cap are those who have just entered the career through a competitive public examination,” the FGV Ibre letter said. “After 12 months, employees begin accumulating additional benefits, and breaches of the cap become widespread.” In 2025, 637 Brazilian judges received more than R$2 million each—more than three times the constitutional ceiling—according to Guedes-Reis. Looking at the more recent period from February 2025 through January 2026, immediately before a Supreme Court ruling on the issue, the number jumped to 997 judges, an increase the FGV Ibre letter described as “a veritable explosion of extreme cases.” A significant part of the problem lies at the state level. Guedes-Reis estimates that between R$12 billion and R$13 billion of the above-cap compensation paid to the four elite legal careers in 2025 came from state governments, where oversight has historically been weaker. Santa Catarina, Rio de Janeiro, Rondônia and São Paulo topped the ranking. Guedes-Reis also examined how Brazil compares with 10 other countries: Germany, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the United States, France, Italy, Mexico, Portugal and the United Kingdom. The median income of Brazilian judges is equivalent to 48 times Brazil’s median national income. In the United States, the highest ratio among the comparison countries, judges earn six times the national median, while in Portugal and Germany the ratio is four times. Even the lowest-paid quartile of Brazilian judges—the bottom 25% by income—earns an average of $290,900 in purchasing-power-parity terms. That exceeds the maximum compensation paid to judges in Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal and Germany and is equivalent to almost 95% of the pay of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. The highest-paid 25% of Brazilian judges, meanwhile, collectively earn more than all roughly 53,000 judges in the other 10 countries in the study combined. “The data contradict the view that these are isolated distortions contained by public scrutiny and recent court decisions,” the FGV Ibre letter said. Using data from Brazil’s Annual Social Information Report (RAIS), Guedes-Reis found that pay inequality within the statutory public sector has surpassed that of the formal private labor market, reversing the public sector’s historical pattern of relatively equal compensation. He estimates that the public-sector payroll accounts for about 10% of income inequality in Brazil. A select group representing just 0.25% of public employees—judges and prosecutors—accounts for about 25% of the richest 1% of public-sector workers and 65% of the richest 0.1%, according to Guedes-Reis. These careers are predominantly white and male. “The state is an active producer of inequality,” Guedes-Reis said. He points to the northern state of Amapá as an example. Judges there account for more than 60% of the 100 residents with the highest labor income, according to his research. Guedes-Reis argues that exceptionally high public-sector pay is neither the result of individual moral failings nor a mere legal loophole, but rather a self-reinforcing equilibrium driven by three mechanisms. “There is a certain failure to understand the problem because much of the public debate in Brazil is based on a somewhat moralistic and individualistic interpretation,” he said. “That kind of approach does not help us understand the nature of the problem.” The first mechanism, according to Guedes-Reis, involves what he calls “preferences shaped by inequality.” Because status is a positional good, any benefit secured by one court immediately creates pressure for others to obtain the same advantage. Elites resist not only absolute income losses but also any narrowing of the gap between the top and bottom of the pay scale. The second mechanism is “corporate coordination”: either all groups exercise restraint or all press for greater benefits. Once most are seeking additional advantages, as Guedes-Reis says is the case in Brazil, restraint is no longer perceived as a virtue but as a strategic mistake. It amounts to a kind of reverse equality, in which privileges are leveled upward. The third mechanism is what Guedes-Reis calls “delegated self-regulation,” which he describes as a distinctive feature of Brazil’s institutional structure. The National Justice Council (CNJ), for example, is composed mostly of judges, while members of the prosecutorial service similarly dominate the National Council of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (CNMP). According to Guedes-Reis, in none of the 10 comparison countries does the judiciary combine, as it does in Brazil, the power to propose rules governing its own compensation with the authority to adjudicate disputes over those rules. Even Congress, he notes, is routinely investigated and judged by members of the same legal careers whose compensation demands lawmakers are responsible for considering. Guedes-Reis says increases in benefits can accelerate when several conditions coincide: political weakness in the executive or legislative branches, fiscal room and a distracted media. He cites the introduction of housing allowances in 2014 and the revival of seniority bonuses in 2022 as examples. The reverse can also be true, he argues. A reputational crisis at the Supreme Court, for instance, could theoretically create an opportunity for tighter regulation. Laws that attempt to specify exhaustively which payments count as salary and which qualify as reimbursements do not address the underlying structure of the problem, according to Guedes-Reis, because they do not change the incentives driving this coordination among groups. “It is the institutional architecture, not the wording of the rule, that determines the equilibrium,” the FGV Ibre letter said. Transparency alone is not enough either, he argues. “Salary transparency portals have become tools for corporate benchmarking,” the letter said. Guedes-Reis has developed a proposal to rationalize Brazil’s public-sector compensation structure. His starting point, based on the U.S. model, is a pay ceiling that applies to total compensation, preventing payments classified as reimbursements or other nonsalary benefits from being excluded from the cap. Using payroll records and microdata for the four elite legal careers in 11 countries, Guedes-Reis ranked compensation in purchasing-power-parity terms to account for differences in purchasing power across countries. He found that Brazilian judges at the 10th percentile—the lowest-paid 10%—already have the fourth-highest compensation among the countries analyzed. From the 25th percentile onward, Brazilian judges are consistently the highest-paid in the sample. Guedes-Reis then established a benchmark for Brazil's ranking, setting the proposed compensation ceiling at the 75th percentile of the international sample. Under that approach, Brazil would still rank third among the 11 countries in terms of the highest-paid legal careers. The advantage, according to the researcher, is that the resulting ceiling would remain close to Brazil’s existing constitutional limits while still placing the country in a position he considers very generous by international standards. Guedes-Reis outlines three possible transition rules. Under the first, the new ceiling would apply only to public employees entering the affected careers after the reform. Under the second approach, current employees would also be included in the new pay structure. However, any compensation above the ceiling would be maintained as an individually identified benefit, frozen in nominal terms, and gradually eroded by inflation. Under the third, all compensation currently received by existing employees would be preserved in nominal terms but would no longer be adjusted for inflation. None of the three options would reduce anyone’s nominal pay. Fiscal savings would instead come gradually through staff turnover and the erosion of the frozen compensation in real terms. “It can be done,” Guedes-Reis said. “It is a major, intergenerational undertaking that will require the involvement of a range of political forces.” According to his estimates, the first transition model would generate R$167 billion in fiscal savings over 20 years. The second would save R$263 billion, while the third would generate R$469 billion in savings. The latter figure exceeds the estimated R$433 billion that Brazil still needs to achieve universal access to basic sanitation by 2033. “The fiscal savings from effectively enforcing public-sector salary ceilings are very significant in themselves,” the FGV Ibre letter said. To illustrate the potential scale of the savings, Guedes-Reis estimates that if the money were instead redistributed to public elementary and secondary school teachers, the ratio between a judge’s starting salary and a teacher’s would fall from 5.6 to about 2. Guedes-Reis also advocates creating an independent body to oversee public-sector compensation. The proposal calls for a permanent national institution that would annually establish a binding compensation range—with a floor, midpoint and ceiling—for the total pay of the careers covered by the system. Congress would then set the final amount within that range. Among other safeguards, members of the careers subject to the salary ceiling would be prohibited from holding a majority of seats on the body. As a precedent for such institutional independence, Guedes-Reis cites the Central Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, known as Copom, which sets monetary policy without a history of its decisions being reviewed on the merits by the Supreme Court.