Fiscal Digital

About

Who we are, where we sit in the ecosystem, and how we operate inside.

Origin

Brazil has more than 5,500 municipalities. Each one publishes an official gazette with contracts, procurement, appointments, and spending. That is millions of pages per year — public data, accessible by law, but impossible to follow at a human scale.

In 2016, the Serenata de Amor project demonstrated that algorithms can identify anomalous patterns in public spending. In 2019, Querido Diário digitized the official gazettes of hundreds of Brazilian municipalities. Fiscal Digital connects these two legacies: it uses the Querido Diário archive as its source and the Serenata principle as its method.

Who we are

Fiscal Digital is a non-partisan, non-governmental civic initiative. We operate as an autonomous agent: five specialized Fiscal Agents read the official gazettes published by Querido Diário (OKFN Brazil) every day, cross-reference public data from the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service and the CGU (Brazil's Federal Office of the Comptroller General), and publish verifiable alerts when they identify patterns that warrant public review.

We are not journalists, not auditors, not a control authority. We are a digital agent that reads public documents methodically and cites the source for everything it publishes.

Position in the ecosystem

There is a clear division of roles in Brazilian civic oversight. Fiscal Digital occupies the intelligence layer over municipal data — the missing layer between Querido Diário's open-data infrastructure and an organized reading by specialized agents.

Serenata de Amor  → Federal   (CEAP)
Querido Diário    → Municipal (open data infrastructure)
Fiscal Digital    → Municipal (intelligence + alerts on QD data)

Open-source governance

All code is public on GitHub. Changes go through open discussion before merge. No relevant technical decision happens outside the public repository.

issue → public discussion → fork → PR → review → merge

Repository map

RepositoryRoleLicense
fiscal-digitalEngine (Fiscal Agents + Skills + API) and TerraformMIT
fiscal-digital-webInstitutional site and per-city dashboardsMIT
fiscal-digital-collectorsData-source adaptersMIT
fiscal-digital-analyticsNotebooks, reports, and CSV exportsCC-BY 4.0

Licensing

We follow the Querido Diário (OKFN Brazil) standard. Code under a permissive license, data and alerts under a license that requires attribution.

  • MITAll code in the main repositories. You may use, modify, and redistribute it, including commercially, as long as the copyright notice is preserved.
  • CC-BY 4.0All published alerts, derived datasets, and analytical materials. You may reuse them freely, provided Fiscal Digital is credited as the source.