FGV’s Rio de Janeiro Law School (Direito Rio) held the ceremony of the “FGV Direito Rio Award – Best Practices in Regulation” on December 12. The award, which is in its first edition, aims to acknowledge innovative initiatives in matters such as transparency, governance, participation, management and protection of the rights of consumers or users. Read about the winning projects below.

The big winner was the project “A practical and functional model of Regulatory Stock Management”, by the Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa). In 2014, Anvisa created a management model for its regulatory stock based on the organization of current rules, monitoring their effectiveness and generating inputs for their review. The goal of the process is to make the stock more efficient, rational, clear and understandable.

According to civil servant Raianne Liberal Coutinho, the agency realized that its people and departments did not have access to the institution’s rules. The consequence was a large volume of conflicting, obsolete and unclear rules, or creating excessive obligations, without the existence of an administration mechanism for the issue.  To achieve such control, the agency created a cyclical management model that focuses on the review of its normative acts. In this sense, three initiatives have been set up.

The first is the themes library, which is a way to provide society and the agency’s departments with access to all of Anvisa’s rules categorized by subject. This system facilitates the access and reduces the risks of creating conflicting rules, as the areas have easy access to all the regulations in force about a particular subject. In addition, this collection made it possible to easily identify the existence of obsolete normative acts. “When the areas analyzed the library for validation, they identified rules that were no longer used and that could be withdrawn entirely”, said the civil servant.

According to Coutinho, another mechanism created for the management model was the problem identification tool, consisting of a form on Anvisa’s portal that anyone – inside or outside the agency – can access to easily report a problem with a rule. In addition, the agency reviews the list of themes that are on the agenda once a year, and the problem identification tool helps in this task. Coutinho explains that when the agency identifies problems in a rule, it goes back into the regulatory agenda. According to the civil servant, it shows how the agency’s regulatory stock is inseparable from its regulatory agenda, and vice versa.

The third initiative is the so-called regulatory guillotine. “This is a unique mechanism that revokes a set of rules”, said Coutinho. She reports that the tool is in its third stage, having already revoked 134 normative acts (6 in the first stage and 128 in the second).

Two other works received Honorable Mention awards: “Normative Resolution No. 388/2015 and its role in the improvement of oversight of the supplementary health sector”, of the National Supplementary Health Agency (ANS), and the “InterAGIR Application”, of the Intermunicipal Regulation Agency of the Middle Valley of the Itajaí (Agir). Go to the website to learn more about these initiatives.