Behavioral analysis of law: application of sanctions by the Federal Court of Accounts to managers with irregular accounts

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira-Castro, Jorge M.
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Oliveira, Adriana de, Aguiar, Julio C. de
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/245

The behavioral analysis of law interprets law as a system whose social function is to reduce the occurrence of politically defined socially undesirable behavior (e.g., offenses), predominantly with the use of coercion. Legal norms are formed by interlocked behavioral patterns, emitted by individuals in different institutions, that are influenced by increases (punitive) or decreases (defensive) in the probability of sanctions being applied. The behavior of applying sanctions, typically by a judge, performs a crucial function in the legal behavior chain, considering that it occurs at the end of the chain and provides feedback to all its antecedent nodes. In the present research, the application of sanctions by the Federal Court of Accounts contingent to the behaviorof managers of federal resources who had their accounts judged as irregular. In order to do this, information contained in two random samples (371 names in each), drawn from the public list, sent to the electoral justice, that contains the names of people whose accounts were judged as irregular. Results indicated that: a) the mean percentage of the fine, established in article 57 of the Law 8.443/92, relatively to the liability value, was equal to 16% in the two samples; b) the value of this fine increased significantly with increases in the liability value and for offenses perpetrated in bad faith; and c) the percentage of this fine decreased significantly with increases in the liability value. In general, results suggest the utility of the theoretical framework advanced by the behavioral analysis of law for the empirical investigation and the interpretation of legal behavior.