Brazil’s Agência de Regulação e Controle de Serviços Públicos do Estado do Pará (ARCON/PA), the public services regulatory agency of Pará state, has published an electronic tender for the rental of two biometric electronic timekeeping devices capable of facial recognition for employee time and attendance control.
The procurement, designated Pregão Eletrônico No. 9/0004/2026, opened April 7, 2026. The tender specifies devices using facial recognition and biometric authentication for employee attendance registration. Electronic biometric timekeeping is a well-established and regulated product category in Brazil, governed by the Ministry of Labour and Employment’s Portaria 671/2021, which sets technical and data standards for electronic attendance registration systems across the public and private sectors. Facial recognition-capable time clocks represent the current generation of compliant devices, extending the specification beyond fingerprint-only readers that have historically dominated public-sector procurements.
The ARCON/PA tender follows a similar municipal procurement in Rio Grande do Sul in February, reflecting the routine adoption of biometric time-and-attendance technology across Brazilian public-sector agencies at multiple levels of government. The tender also sits within Brazil’s broader push toward biometric verification in public administration, which in 2025 extended to a federal mandate requiring biometric authentication for access to social benefit programs.
ARCON/PA is the Pará state authority responsible for regulating public concession services. Pará is one of Brazil’s largest states by area, located in the Amazon region. The two-device procurement is a small operational purchase serving the agency’s internal workforce attendance management needs rather than a programmatic deployment, and the contract value was not specified in the public tender notice. The pregão eletrônico format used for the tender is Brazil’s standard electronic competitive bidding mechanism for government operational purchases, requiring suppliers to submit offers through a digital procurement platform rather than through a sealed-bid paper process.
Sources: ARCON/PA
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
