INSS changes calculation system after the end of the single contribution

The INSS (Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social) is adapting the retirement simulator to exclude a more advantageous calculation rule brought about by the Social Security reform. The reason for the exclusion is the publication of law 14,331, which went into effect in May this year, and ends the rule.

The single contribution was included in the pension calculation as of November 13, 2019 with the reform. The rule consisted of the possibility for the insured to discard all the smallest contributions and use only one, of greater value, in his average salary, to increase the retirement.

To use it, however, it was necessary to have a minimum time of at least 180 contributions and provided that the discarded payments are not used either in the INSS or in another social security system.

After calculating the average with a single contribution, the reducers of the reform transition rules were applied to it. The calculation was advantageous because it allowed the insured to discard all low values ​​that would compromise retirement.

The reason is that, with the reform, all contribution salaries after July 1994 started to be valid in the benefit account, without discarding the lowest 20%. This reduced the average salary. But, by approving the changes in retirement, deputies and senators ended the rule of the minimum divisor, making possible the new rule, called “miracle of retirement”.

​An example of a single-contribution pension would be that of a worker who has completed 15 years of contribution before July 1994 and has currently reached the minimum age requirement. If he has six more contributions paid in reais, with smaller amounts, and a contribution towards the INSS ceiling (R$ 6,433.57 in 2021), he could discard these six payments and use as a reference for the calculation only the contribution for the ceiling.

The profile that fit was of policyholders who collected contributions before July 1994, already have a 15-year grace period and do not have many payments after the beginning of the Real Plan.

Simulator goes offline

In a note, the INSS reported that the simulator is “temporarily unavailable until the system is adapted to the legal changes brought by law 14,331/2022, which amended law 8,213/1991, with new parameters for calculating value”.

In addition, the institute recalls that the calculation of the average salary “is only available to those who are five years away from applying for retirement”.

Both the institute and lawyers advise the insured to use the calculation of the average always through Meu INSS. The reason is that the calculation is not easy and errors may occur if the worker wants to do it on his own.

“I think it’s complicated because the insured will have to add up all the contributions that are in the Cnis [cadastro de contribuições] from July 1994 until now and divide by the number of months, it’s not easy and there can be mistakes”, says lawyer João Badari, from the Aith, Badari e Luchin office.

Even in the calculation made by Meu INSS there are flaws, according to experts, since, if all contributions are not in the Cnis, the system will not be able to calculate the correct amount. In addition, the insured person with particularities in his work trajectory, such as having special time, for example, has an approximate and not exact calculation.

How to calculate retirement?

The lawyer Carolina Centeno de Souza, from Arraes e Centeno Advocacia, says that, for the insured person on the eve of applying for the benefit, it is best to look for a specialist who can make the calculations and plan the best retirement for the beneficiary.

“With the in-depth knowledge of a specialist, the insured will be able to have a project with the most favorable possibilities. In social security planning, retirement is treated as an investment, as it should be”, she says.

According to Carolina, failures in the INSS simulator are constant. “The INSS retirement simulator goes offline or doesn’t work properly every time the Social Security has a change in the access requirements or in the benefit calculation rule. It was like this, in 2019, during the pension reform and that’s exactly what is happening now.”

The institute says that Dataprev has been carrying out “several interventions to improve the performance of Meu INSS”. There is no deadline for the simulator to work again.