Transparência Brasil presents recommendations to improve the Judicial Salary 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 to the National Observatory on Integrity and Transparency (ONIT) on Aug. 14, 2026, 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 solely 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 for a given benefit and the entry of miscellaneous items in the “details” field, where free-form entry should be replaced with 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 breaking down the 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 payment line item—a requirement that has gained urgency following a ruling by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) in May 2026. It further advocates for the standardization of the nomenclature for salary line items across all courts, with retroactive effect on payments already published.
