Transparência Brasil and 14 other civil society organizations filed on this Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026, a joint letter to the Minister of the Office of the Comptroller General of the Union (CGU), Vinícius Marques de Carvalho. The document requests that the CGU deny the motion for review filed by the Federal Attorney General’s Office (AGU) against a decision that ordered the release of the database of attorneys’ fees paid to federal employees in cases where they lost their cases.

The payments totaled R$ 12.7 billion between January 2020 and August 2025, according to a joint study by TB and the Pessoas à Frente Movement published in December 2025, and are made possible by critical flaws in control and governance, as the organizations pointed out in a follow-up study published six months later.

The database feeds the Panel on Attorney Fees for Losing Cases, maintained by the AGU itself, which imposes barriers to comprehensive queries and does not allow the download of the full dataset. Transparência Brasil requested the data under the Law on Access to Information (LAI) eleven months ago, through two requests: one on September 11, 2025, for the full data from the “fee details” tab of the panel; and another on August 11, 2025, for the full data from the “fees” tab of the panel.

Information (LAI) eleven months ago, through two requests: one on Sept. 11, 2025, for the full data from the panel’s “fee details” tab; and another on Sept. 24, 2025, for information on fee entries in Siape, payments broken down by item, and information on payments for “remuneration,” “compensation,” and “prior periods.”

The AGU denied both requests in its initial responses and in two appeal proceedings. On Nov. 25, 2025, Transparência Brasil filed an appeal with the CGU. The appeal was pending for six months, a period longer than that provided for in the LAI. On May 25, 2026, the CGU ruled in favor of the disclosure of the data. The AGU stated at the time that it would review its position and send the dataset within one month.

On June 24, 2026, however, the acting chief justice of the AGU, Flavio José Roman, asked the CGU to review the decision that the agency had already committed to upholding.

In its request for review, the AGU argues that the disclosure of the database would result in “excessive scrutiny of the financial lives” of public servants and could potentially lead to “misinterpretations” and damage the agency’s “institutional image.”

The letter characterizes both arguments as weak and dangerous: the first sets a precedent for preventing the disclosure of any salary data for public officials; the second reveals the AGU’s intention to control how public information is interpreted.

The document also questions the authority to rule on the request. CGU Normative Ordinance No. 101/2023 assigns this analysis to the National Secretariat for Transparency and Access to Information—not to the minister directly, as the AGU requests.

The organizations request that the request for review be denied and that the CGU’s decision be immediately enforced. The letter argues that the requested data already exists and is already fed into a public tool maintained by the AGU itself, without the need for additional systematization.

In addition to Transparência Brasil, the document is signed by: Movimento Pessoas à Frente, Livres, Associação Fiquem Sabendo, Open Knowledge Brasil, República.org, Contas Abertas, CLP (Center for Public Leadership), Plataforma JUSTA, Transparency International – Brazil, ARTICLE 19, Instituto OPS, Base dos Dados, Central das Emendas, and the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji).