A transparência orçamentária como instrumento de inclusão cidadã e combate à corrupção: uma análise da acessibilidade dos portais de transparência para a população com baixa renda e escolaridade

Abstract

This study analyzes how budget transparency acts as an instrument for citizen inclusion and combating corruption, focusing on the barriers to information access faced by the low education and low-income Brazilian population. Despite the institutional and normative advances promoted by the Fiscal Responsibility Law (LRF) and the Access to Information Law (LAI), the effectiveness of public transparency depends on society's ability to understand and use the data provided. The research, qualitative and descriptive in nature, adopted documentary analysis and a comparative approach to evaluate the transparency portals of six Brazilian municipalities: São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Uberlândia, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, and Manaus. The analysis criteria included language clarity, data updating, ease of navigation, open data availability, and digital accessibility level (WCAG). The results demonstrate that, although the municipalities comply with legal publicity requirements and show technological regularity, critical structural bottlenecks persist, such as the excessive use of technical language, usability flaws, and heterogeneity in accessibility resources for people with disabilities. Such barriers, combined with the digital exclusion and functional illiteracy of a significant portion of the population, limit the potential for popular engagement and the full exercise of fiscal citizenship. It is concluded that budget transparency restricted to the formal compliance of data disclosure is insufficient to promote effective social control, requiring active policies of fiscal education, the adoption of plain language, and the standardization of digital accessibility to mitigate informational inequalities and strengthen public integrity.