On Friday (Aug. 14, 2026), Transparência Brasil presented recommendations to improve the Judges’ Compensation Dashboard, a tool maintained by the National Council of Justice (CNJ) that publishes the pay stubs of Brazilian judges. The proposals were submitted for public consultation by the National Observatory on Integrity and Transparency (ONIT) and address shortcomings in the availability, completeness, and quality of the published data.

Today, following improvements, the dashboard has a more responsive interface, offers greater data integration, and allows users to download annual data from all available agencies in a single operation. However, it continues to function only as a dashboard, not as an open data portal, since its infrastructure does not support automated access to published data—it lacks logical, standardized URLs for direct file downloads and does not provide data via API, two practices that the organization recommends.

Transparência Brasil also suggests creating automatic checks and alerts capable of identifying inconsistencies when populating the databases. These safeguards would prevent, for example, the reporting of amounts that significantly exceed the median value for a given benefit, as well as the entry of miscellaneous items in the “details” field—which, instead of being left open-ended, should be restricted to fixed, predetermined categories. They would also prevent issues such as entering numbers in fields reserved for text, as well as the practice of grouping an agency’s set of monthly pay stubs under the generic code “0” without itemizing payments by individual judge. 

Regarding data quality, the organization advocates for including a distinction between active and inactive judges in the database. It also proposes the creation of a unique identifier for each judge, which is currently absent from the public database. Without this ID, the presence of people with the same name and changes in last names due to marriage or divorce, for example, make it difficult to track a single judge’s compensation over time.

Transparência Brasil further recommends that retroactive payments be accompanied by the specific budget line item and the legal, regulatory, or judicial basis for each line item—a requirement that has become urgent following a ruling by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) in May 2026. It also advocates for the standardization of the nomenclature for compensation line items across all courts, with retroactive effect on payments already published. 

To support this standardization, Transparência Brasil suggests its own methodology, developed in collaboration with República.org as part of the DadosJusBr project. The study identified, in the database of pay stubs from the Judiciary and the Public Prosecutor’s Office collected since 2018, more than 3,300 distinct pay line item names, grouped into 61 standardized categories.

The recommendations are based on a five-year history of joint work. Since 2021, a technical cooperation agreement between Transparência Brasil and the CNJ has led the organization to produce periodic reports on the completeness of the information made available on the dashboard — reports that the Council began using to hold courts accountable that were not complying with CNJ Resolution No. 215/2016 and Ordinance No. 63/2017. In 2023, Transparência Brasil noted a 35% improvement in pay transparency between January 2018 and October 2022, with the addition of 84 months’ worth of pay stubs that had previously been missing.

Part of the panel’s recent progress stems directly from this joint effort. The gap in monitoring the courts’ accountability, identified by Transparência Brasil as part of the cooperation agreement, led to the creation of the “Submission Tracking” tab, which was recently added and allows users to see which courts failed to submit data in a given month. The dashboard now also offers comparative charts between agencies and enables the consolidated download of tables showing pay stubs, personal entitlements, compensation, and contingent entitlements with data from all agencies—previously, each agency had to be selected manually.

“The recent improvements demonstrate the judiciary’s progress toward greater transparency and better accountability, but it is important to note that there is still room for improvement in the areas of data openness and the quality of the information provided,” says Bianca Berti, senior analyst for transparency and integrity at Transparência Brasil. “For the information to be complete, reliable, and truly useful for public oversight, improvements must be ongoing and accompanied by greater civil society participation.”