The Federal Government, through provisional presidential decree No. 1176 of June 2023, established the Emergency Program for the Renegotiation of Debts of Defaulting Individuals, also known as Desenrola Brasil. The program is linked to the Ministry of Finance and aims to further the renegotiation of private debts of individuals registered or not in default registers to reduce their indebtedness and facilitate the resumption of access to the credit market.
The guarantees offered through the program to both debtors and creditors have been making an impact on the Brazilian economic scenario. Financial institutions, which are more interested and affected, have already begun to anticipate in this initial stage an improvement in capital ratios, an increase in the level of loan recovery, an improvement in default, and an end to moral hazard, as some customers stopped paying their debts hoping for better payment terms.
Notably, such renegotiation translates into an expected relief to consumers, even implying the possibility of regaining access to new credits, which is naturally in the interest of the banking community. The benefits are even greater for banks’ balance sheets, given that the 2022 financial reporting season was hard hit by a high degree of default.
The Brazilian Federation of Banks (FEBRABAN) announced that by August 07, 2023, the Desenrola Brasil program, through debt renegotiations, would have reached about BRL 5.4 bn in financial volume, exclusively for Range II, a group that includes people with monthly income equal to or less than BRL 20,000. In the same period, estimates are that financial institutions alone could write off negative entries of about 4.8 million customers who had bank debts of up to the BRL 100 threshold.
In addition, an important fact is that with the massive removal of restrictions and possibility of renegotiation already started by the participating banking intuitions, a factor directly achieved, and which tends to reflect more and more in the course of the development and performance of those engaged in the program, is the impact on the reduction of lawsuits, whether in collections filed by creditors, as well as by the requests for review themselves or the write-off of restriction triggered by consumers.
This decrease in judicialization will possibly have an effect on the current pressure on the domestic court system, that is, enabling the reduction of lawsuits to be dealt with in court and consequently ensuring the focus on the application of the premises of speed in the processing of claims not contemplated in the program’s renegotiation scope, which would naturally guarantee greater quality and speed in the activities expected for the sector.
In particular, the federal government’s effort furthers alignment, albeit possibly unintentionally, with the Code of Civil Procedure itself, since in its initial chapter aimed at the core rules of civil procedure, the legislature assigned to the State the duty to promote, whenever possible, the consensual solution of disputes (Article 3, Paragraph2).
In point of fact, such idea of dejudicialization, or at least of minimizing the course of procedures, based on the aim to fight against the buildup of lawsuits, has also been the object of attention of the Federal Supreme Court itself, which established in 2020, through Resolution No. 697/2020, the Mediation and Conciliation Center (CMC), a unit charged with the search and implementation of settlement solutions in the proceedings pending at the Supreme Court.
Thus, it is certain that the program, in addition to supporting consumer status’ improvement towards new access to credit facilities, thus moving the economy and benefiting all those involved, especially financial institutions, also plays an important role in the resolution of disputes in the private sphere, with optimistic projections when it comes to the traditional way of resorting to the court system, in view of the anticipated way of achieving results that would usually only be achieved with time-consuming judicial decisions or agreements formalized in the course of proceedings.
Available at: https://www.estadao.com.br/opiniao/espaco-aberto/desjudicializacao-um-reflexo-positivo-do-desenrola-brasil/
Autor: Lucas Rodrigues Lucas • email: lucas.lucas@ernestoborges.com.br
