The International Budget Partnership is a non-profit organisation concerned with encouraging transparency in federal budgets. Based on the premises of the IMF and the OECD, it has developed the Open Budget Index, with which it is possible to classify countries according to the degree of transparency in their respective budgets. In all its editions, Brazil has never managed to enter the Extensive Sufficient Information group, which receives the highest scores in the ranking in question. Bearing in mind that there is no consensus in the literature on what would be considered a strong or ideal budget, but there is congruence on the relevance of transparency in the public sector, the following aspects of the Brazilian budget process are compared with those of the countries that stood out in the 2015 publication (New Zealand, Sweden, South Africa, Norway and the United States): bodies involved in the budget process; legislation/reports that support the public budget; and stages of thebudget cycle.