There is a widespread perception in Brazil that civil servants caught in corrupt practices are not punished. Yet, until now, there was no hard evidence that would support such claim and some argued that this was just a misleading perception due to the recent increase in anti-corruption measures. One of the main reasons for this notable absence is the difficulty of identifying atual cases of corruption to evalute whether the agents are actully being punished by the judicial system or not. This article uses the brazilian triple responsibility system as a natural experiment to assess juducial system is highly ineffective agaist corruption with a lower than 5% probability of conviction.
corruption; public administration; legal procedure; judiciary; enforcement
