ID: 15697
Autoria:
José Maria A. M. Dias.
Fonte:
Revista de Administração Pública, v. 9, n. 3, p. 47-67, Julho-Setembro, 1975. 21 página(s).
Tipo de documento: Artigo (Português)
Ver Resumo
The article begins by describing the difficulties which the proliferation of decentralized units in the federal bureaucracy, has produced. Decentralization has created particular difficulties for the ministerial supervision required by law and for systematlc government planning. In the context of decentralized units, the study concentrates on an analysis of "autonomous agencies" (órgãos autônomos), as defined by Decree-law n. 200/67, one of the basic documents in the reform of the federal public administration; the article tries to verify to what extent the existing legislation succeeds in describing these agencies and in granting them the conditions necessary for a truly autonomous existence. The author notes that the autonomous category is legally applicable only to direct administration agencies, which is an indication that decentralization is practiced in this part of the government. On the other hand, because of imperfections in Decree-law n. 200/67 itself, especially its conflicts with budgetary legislation, the law does not provide sufficiently clear criteria for the systematic use of this category as an instrument of administrative decentralization. The author notes that, due to this ambiguity, the use of this category rarely leads to the administrative and financial autonomy which could improve the efficiency of a government agency; this is made clear by the fact that even the most recent legislation on the subject refers to these agencies as "relatively autonomous agencies" and not as "autonomaus agencies" as the phrase appears in Decree-Law n. 200/67. With these thoughts in mind, an explicit official interpretation of the appropriate articles of Decree-Law n. 200/67 is advocated to eliminate doubts about how such autonomous agencies are to be defined and to give them the conditions needed to achieve their objectives and carry out their activities more effectively.
