Só a lei não resolve tudo: uma etnografia da Corregedoria-Geral da União

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the Brazilian National Disciplinary Office (Corregedoria-Geral da União – CRG). The research examines a series of initiatives that have unfolded since the creation of the agency to which it is linked — the Brazilian Office of the Comptroller General (Controladoria-Geral da União – CGU), in 2003 —, and which have consolidated the CRG as an institution whose actions have a broad impact on the professional lives of federal civil servants. The aim is to understand CRG’s production of mechanisms, norms, and artifacts for controlling (and shaping) the federal civil service. Based on the perceptions generated by CRG staff (auditors), I discuss forms of identifying and framing behaviors as transgressions against the public service which result, among other measures, in the creation of consensus and instruments for directing the activity of public servants, intended for a specific target audience—namely, the disciplinary officers of public institutions (those who lead an internal affairs unit within an institution, that is, who coordinate disciplinary and sanctioning activities within a public body). To this end, I explore the pathways of civil service oversight: the National Disciplinary Office (CRG) itself and the development of a Brazilian administrative disciplinary law; the work of the auditors, the CRG’s public agents who give life and momentum to understandings of how the public service should (and should not) be; the CRG’s goal of normative expansion on multiple fronts (in written rules, in systems, and orally); the ePAD project, an electronic system created by the CRG that reconfigured disciplinary proceedings; and, finally, the understanding that all these measures, taken together, contribute to the production of theories of the State. The research made it possible to conclude that the initiatives originating from this particular agency—the Corregedoria-Geral da União—are producing a silent administrative reform, driven not by the traditional route of formal legislative production, but through multiple forms of administrative normative production, which is realized through relationships of persuasion and trust between auditors and internal affairs officers (seeking to navigate tensions and resistance). The most recent expression of these standardization practices—one of the pillars in the making of the disciplinary law emerging from the CRG (and with greater potential reach for the goal of uniformization)—is the ePAD. I identified in the auditors’ actions an ideal horizon grounded in the public goods they seek to promote: unity/uniformity of understandings, qualification of the public service, and more “fair” disciplinary processes. Fieldwork was conducted from March 2022 to July 2025 in the cities of Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília, involving observations, in-person and remoteinterviews, and document analysis.