1) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 3072 of the year 2011.

The judgment acknowledged that improvements would largely depend on budgetary increments, as the significant discrepancy between resources and market demand meant that mid-level public managers couldn’t optimize NMA’s performance to an acceptable level. Nevertheless, the ruling ordered the creation of 8 different action plans for the agency’s performance issues related to the backlog of pending processes and inspection routines.

2) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 657 of the year 2012.

The decision stated that “despite internal efforts, the NMA has faced budgetary constraints largely hindering its institutional mission. This can only be resolved with the Executive Branch’s involvement alongside the agency. However, other managerial aspects can be directly addressed by the ANM.” Therefore, 12 performance recommendations were issued, along with 2 notifications about “facts” and 7 notifications about improprieties in the decision-making process.

3) Judgement of the Survey n˚ 958 of the year 2013.

Both the audit team’s report and the Minister’s vote revealed that “a certain degree of DNPM inefficiency” in performing its institutional missions underpinned the deliberation proposal. The ruling generically informed DNPM of “the fragility of controls and the current oversight exercised by the agency over mining enterprises involving rare earth elements.” A 30-day deadline was set for implementing measures.

4) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 1979 of the year 2014.

The audit ruling made 14 recommendations for NMA to reformulate its inspection priorities as indicated by the FCA, enhance its informational systems, develop various internal management improvements requiring significant workforce restructuring, reallocate human and material resources, and reformulate a normative act about the extractive industry regulated by NMA. In the end, NMA was instructed to present an action plan and implementation schedule for the recommended measures, effectively converting the recommendations into command acts.

5) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 2440 of the year 2016.

This performance audit aimed to assess NMA’s performance regarding the regulation of mining dam safety. The audit perceived NMA’s frailty surpasses singular and punctual acts, encompassing the entire inspection process, largely due to the agency’s administrative structure’s weakness from a budgetary, financial, and human resources standpoint. The technical team deemed it implausible to individualize conducts (especially omissive ones) to allocate penalties in this case, considering they are systemic flaws. The Minister argued similarly, claiming they are “intrinsic problems to the agency, inefficient and lacking material conditions to satisfactorily fulfill its duties.”

Paradoxically, the ruling ordered the initiation of a separate process to investigate the public managers’ personal responsibility “for the lack of adequate governance and proper operational structuring of the agency, rendering it incapable of satisfactorily exercising its competencies, as reported in this performance audit”. Additionally, 6 recommendations were issued about the internal management of inspection routines, and subsequently, the NMA was coercively instructed to inform about the adopted measures, aligning those recommendations with coercive acts.

6) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 513 of the year 2018.

The performance audit aimed to assess NMA’s management of mining licenses. However, it was constructed through a compliance audit question: “are niobium licensing processes in accordance with legal and normative assumptions?”, showing signs of confusion, indifference, or inattention to different control dynamics. The audit team highlighted that the difficulties listed about the inspection action stem from the lack of financial resources and regularity in their release (given the contingencies affecting the agency prevent the synchronization of any planned inspection actions). Still, the Minister believed it possible to optimize the scarce resources. In the end, the ruling issued two determinations for NMA to issue new normative acts, reformulating and clarifying inspection priorities, based both on the FCA and NMA by-laws.

7) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 2604 of the year 2018.

The performance audit aimed to assess to what extent federal public administration agencies are exposed to fraud and corruption risks. The ruling resulted in determinations for NMA to address omissions related to its risk and integrity management. The pointed norms all referred to infralegal acts about internal ethics management. Moreover, it resulted in recommendations for ANM to enhance its informational and integrity management, assigning well-defined responsibilities to its internal actors and establishing institutional mechanisms capable of filling the identified gaps.

8) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 958 of the year 2019.

This performance audit was a regional version of the Judgement 2604/2018. In this sense, it aimed to assess to what extent public administration agencies based in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso are exposed to fraud and corruption risks. It ruled a recommendation for compliance with federal governance policy, subsequently instructing the presentation of an action plan containing the schedule for adopting the necessary measures to implement the issued recommendation, defining responsibilities, deadlines, and activities about the measures.

9) Judgement of the Compliance Audit n˚ 1116 of the year 2020.

The compliance audit aimed to understand the legal regularity of measures adopted by NMA to monitor and inspect mining waste dams, especially the dam that broke in the city of Brumadinho. For these reasons, the audit team’s control parameters were exclusively legal, making it reasonably clear it wasn’t about performance control. Thus, the control dynamic was based on normative subsumption, and not on performance criteria. Regarding the Brumadinho rupture, the audit team concluded that ANM acted in compliance with the legislation and used its scarce human and material

resources according to the dam’s risk and potential damage classification, based on data provided by the entrepreneur. The Ministers disagreed, believing NMA didn’t adequately inspect the provided information. The Ministers recorded their understanding that it’s up to FCA to ensure regulatory functions are fulfilled and intervene more intensively in NMA. The ruling ended by ordering the initiation of a process aiming to hold NMA’s board of directors personally accountable.

10) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 1193 of the year 2020.

This Judgement aimed to assess ANM’s management performance regarding the monitoring and inspection of mine closure processes, based on obligations set in Brazilian mining legislation. After showcasing the set of norms governing the matter, the report went on to demonstrate the agency’s management performance frailties. Both the technical unit and the Ministers understood that mine closure plans are mere intention plans, lacking consistency, robustness, and materiality, and that they aren’t required and inspected most of the time. But this conclusion led to different deliberation proposals. The technical unit believed NMA should draft specific norms guiding servers on what the analysis criteria and standards should be to approve or reject plans, besides taking measures to internally enhance processes related to mine closure. On the other hand, the Ministers were convinced the minimum criteria already existed in NMA’s norms, but NMA failed to make entrepreneurs comply with such criteria. Therefore, the Minister believed it necessary to initiate a process aiming to hold NMA’s board personally accountable. The ruling, then, initiated a punitive process after performance evaluations.

11) Judgement of the Performance Audit n˚ 1837 of the year 2020.

This audit was initiated to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the National Mining Agency in regulating, granting, and inspecting the Artisanal Mining Permit regime. The technical unit proposed a recommendation for NMA to establish reasonable deadlines for processing requests, as well as a recommendation to devise an action strategy to analyze the existing backlog. The Minister responsible for this case saw it differently. Against the process’s slowness, the Minister believed the best option would be to hold ANM’s board of directors accountable for the supposed systematic omission leading NMA to be non-compliant with the general deadlines of the Brazilian Administrative Process Law, and to compel NMA to reformulate the Artisanal Mining Permit grant rite, simplifying it. Determinations about ANM’s core activities.

12) Judgement of the Monitoring Audit n˚ 2914 of the year 2020.

This was the first of three phases of monitoring conducted over the National Mining Agency with the general objective of monitoring its restructuring, to assess its adequacy to the parameters defined by law and the best practices identified in other regulatory agencies. The ruling issued a determination for NMA to demonstrate full compliance with transparency requirements contained in financial legislation. However, one Minister’s vote showed that he believes it’s up to FCA to correct NMA’s compliance flaws with mining legislation, which wouldn’t be done only because the board of directors already presented initiatives to the audit unit.