A new survey by Transparência Brasil and Movimento Pessoas à Frente reveals that active and inactive lawyers and prosecutors at the Federal Attorney General’s Office (AGU) received R$4.5 billion above the constitutional ceiling in fees for successive cases between Jan.2020 and Aug.2025.
These payments originate from attorneys’ fees for cases involving the federal government, municipalities and federal public foundations and are managed by the Board of Trustees for Attorneys’ Fees (CCHA), a private entity.
The fees are amounts owed by the losing party in lawsuits – and also in administrative and judicial collections of the Union’s active debt. In the period analyzed, 58% of lawyers and prosecutors (7,649 beneficiaries) received accumulated payments of more than R$1 million.
Both the Federal Supreme Court (in 2020) and the Federal Court of Auditors (in 2021) determined that the amount of legal fees should be added to the civil servant’s other remuneration in order to apply the constitutional remuneration ceiling (which is currently R$46,366.19). However, in order to circumvent the legislation, the CCHA has created various “penduricalhos”. These are sums such as supplementary health allowances and supplementary food allowances, which are classified as indemnities so that the ceiling does not apply to them.
In addition, new members of the legal professions start to receive perquisites funded from the resources managed by the CCHA, such as a health allowance, in the month following their appointment. This happens as opposed to the one-year period of activity established in the legislation to become beneficiaries of the apportionment. We found 435 graduates since January 2024 who, before completing twelve months in post, received a total of R$15 million.
Dead people, including those who have been dead for more than five years, are also listed as beneficiaries of these funds. In six cases, the pension holder is an active or retired civil servant and also receives fees for their legal work, indicating the possibility of double receipt.
The survey shows that the distribution of amounts by the CCHA in excess of the ceiling has exploded in the last two years. Taking into account active and inactive staff, there were R$3.8 billion extra in the first eight months of 2025 alone for 11,700 lawyers, paid in various ways, under the guise of compensation and including retroactive payments.
The study adopted a conservative methodology to measure the amounts paid out-of-pocket, adding the amounts received by each civil servant to the base salary for each month, without taking into account occasional payments (such as the 13th and vacations) or various indemnities paid by the Federal Government.
