Vitor José Ferreira do Couto
Lawyer at Marcos Martins Advogados
Aware of the fact that Brazil is one of the leaders in filing lawsuits and has one of the most significant workloads in the world, the National Council of Justice, in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Nations Development Program, created the Justice 4.0 Program.
Within this context, the extreme need to increasingly use technology as an ally of the Judiciary was verified, always with the priority of reducing costs and increasing the speed and effectiveness of judicial activity. The Justice 4.0 Program was created to promote a true digital transformation of the Brazilian judiciary, in order to expand access to the population and improve the efficiency and transparency of the electronic judicial process system.
One of the basic sub-programs of Justice 4.0 was launched recently, in August of this year, and is Sniper, the acronym for the National System for Asset Investigation and Asset Recovery, the scope of which is to reduce the burden of enforcement proceedings in order to optimize and automate the work of the courts in helping to find attachable assets on behalf of debtors and their accomplices.
This is due to the fact that the platform integrates and graphically presents databases and information on movable and immovable property, shareholdings and assets in general, of both natural and legal persons, which facilitates the search for the debtor’s seized assets in credit recovery actions, being able to identify, in a matter of seconds, the corporate, property and financial links between natural and legal persons.
Sniper ‘s robust database holds information on CPF, CNPJ, declared funds of election candidates, duly registered aircraft and ships, information on administrative sanctions and other penalties applied to companies and individuals, as well as all available information on legal proceedings.
By the way, there is the possibility for the judge to enter new information into the system (provided in the file of the specific case) when using the tool, even with the fact of cross-referencing data with people who may be linked to assets, albeit in a veiled way.
The system is easily integrated by the courts and can only be accessed by authorized servers with a court order authorizing the breach of the debtor’s confidentiality.
In any case, when the data is aggregated on the Sniper platform, the actions taken by creditors will be faster and cheaper and, as a result, the provision of justice will become more efficient.
The tool also makes it possible to cross-reference information stored in different databases, which facilitates the recovery of funds in cases of crimes committed against the financial system, as well as in cases of fraud and fraud against creditors.
It is important to clarify that the necessity and applicability of using Sniper will depend on the demonstration of the creditor party and the conviction of the magistrates who have access to the system.
In fact, the legal certainty to know exactly in which cases Sniper can be used will only come with eventual regulation, to be issued by the National Council of Justice itself, or defined by the Higher Courts. Before then, the tendency is for there to be a lot of divergent case law on the subject.
The Marcos Martins law firm is attentive to new jurisprudential developments in order to clarify any doubts on the subject.
