Resumo:
The Brazilian Public Administration is responsible for developing improvements in its
accountability processes, in other words, in procedures related to the transparency of
government practices and the duty to account for the use of its resources, with a view to
promoting management efficiency. In such context, there is a need for cost disclosure in the
Brazilian public sector, mainly due to the contrast between the public scarcity of resources,
against the basic need to maintain the “machine”, and the search for new investments. Federal
legislation makes the calculation of costs in Public Accounting mandatory, and, in consequence,
the federal government and its respective control agencies have demanded their disclosure
among other entities. Considering these legal and governmental impositions, as well as the
difficulties of implementing a systematic calculation of costs by Federal Institutions of Higher
Education (IFES), this paper aims to analyze the process of implementing this structure at the
Federal University of Itajubá (UNIFEI), based on the flow of procedures developed by the
National Treasury Secretariat (STN), having as a preponderant factor the effective use of the
Federal Government Cost Information System (SIC). The action research was the research
method adopted, since the study consisted of the application of practice, together with
theoretical investigation, to solve a specific problem, in addition to having been able to correlate
the phases of this method with the steps of the SIC implementation flow proposed by the STN.
Therefore, after all the analysis carried out during the SIC implementation process at UNIFEI,
verifying its strengths, difficulties, actions performed, and recommendations for improvement,
an implementation flow was proposed with the steps identified as essential for the effective
implementation in a Ifes, through the comparative examination between the best practices of
different authors and the STN model. Finally, we concluded that the data provided during all
phases of the process, as well as those obtained through the SIC, resulting from the costing
methodology adopted, were able to generate useful information capable of being used in the
future in the system management phase in order to collaborate in the measurement and
disclosure of costs, as well as in support of decision-making by managers. We hope that this
work has contributed to the debate in the area of costs in public service, presenting options and
solutions regarding the real difficulties for the effective implementation of a system for
calculating costs in Brazilian Ifes.
