New INSS president plans to end waiting list by July 2022

The new president of INSS (National Social Security Institute), José Carlos Oliveira, drew up a plan to try to end the waiting list for Social Security benefits until July 2022. Oliveira has worked since April with his predecessor, Leonardo Rolim, in measures to solve the problem.

The strategy is to extend the automatic analysis of retirement requests — without the need for a server’s endorsement.

Another item in the plan is to speed up the assessment of the social and physical conditions of those applying for the BPC (assistance benefit for low-income seniors and people with disabilities). The plan is that the analysis of the social profile will also be done remotely.

Today, the INSS has about 1.8 million cases to be analyzed, of which 500 thousand are BPC requirements.

The deadline for analyzing these requests is 45 days. Of the total volume, around 900,000 are within this period and the other half are overdue for more than that period.

The government claims that around 900,000 processes are the monthly average of applications. Therefore, clearing the queue means having 900,000 orders to be analyzed —on schedule.

Since 2018, due to the increase in requirements, the INSS began to delay the evaluation of requests for retirement and other benefits. The queue reached about 2.3 million applications at the end of 2019. Several attempts to clear the backlog have failed.

At the beginning of November, Rolim was removed from the position of president of the INSS, which he had held since January of last year. He returned to assume the Welfare secretariat at the Ministry of Labor and Welfare.

To replace Rolim, Oliveira was appointed, who has a degree in business administration and has been a civil servant at the INSS since July 1985. He was regional superintendent for the Southeast and executive manager in São Paulo.

Since May, Oliveira held the position of director of benefits at the INSS, which takes care of the queue. It was in this position that he began to prepare measures to reduce the waiting list and prepare for a possible transition to Rolim’s vacancy.

Oliveira is close to members of the PSD and MDB tops Despite his capacity for political articulation, his nomination for the position, according to INSS members, was not due to his relationship with these parties. PSD and MDB are not part of the government’s base and currently plan to launch candidates for the presidential race in 2022 — running against Jair Bolsonaro, who intends to seek re-election.

Internally, the new INSS president has the support of employees of the agency and is cited as a manager who increased productivity in the analysis of applications in the Southeast.

As part of the strategy to clear the waiting lines at the INSS, the idea is to start a phase of modernization in the agency, mainly by reinforcing the automatic approval of benefits.

For this, the Social Security system needs to be improved. The plan is that, when the worker completes the requirements for retirement, he will be able to fill in the data electronically and, after the information is checked by the system, authorization will be given automatically — without relying on an employee’s manual analysis.

However, the measures elaborated by Oliveira and Rolim may not be enough to solve the queuing problem, in the evaluation of the IBDP (Brazilian Institute of Social Security Law).

“There is a lack of server to work at the INSS. Putting people who are not qualified to analyze the process is not the solution. The social security rules are very complex”, said the president of the IBDP, Adriane Bramante. According to her, even in automatic analysis, it will often be necessary for a server to verify the process.

From 2016 to this year, there was a decrease of 10,000 employees working at the agency. The INSS staff fell from 33 thousand to 23 thousand in the period.

The shortage of employees is pointed out by members of the government as one of the reasons for the increase in the waiting list for analyzing applications for retirement and Social Security benefits.

Among the 23,000 currently working at the INSS, there are career, temporary and those requested by other bodies.

Between 2019 and 2020, when there was a greater lack of control in the queue, the INSS found it difficult to analyze the number of requests for benefits, which grew due to the digitalization of the retirement and pension application process.

However, the reduction of the INSS staff was an announced problem. The government was already counting on the drop in the number of active employees of the agency because of pensions.

The INSS has been trying to compensate for the strong reduction in the workforce by the end of the year and, to prevent the agency’s activities from being compromised, it has requested the transfer of labor from other areas of public administration, such as workers at Infraero (Company of Airport Infrastructure).

The plan outlined by Oliveira also provides for the extension of temporary contracts and the expansion of servers ceded by other bodies. government officials say they do not have a public examination for the Social Security area.

There have already been several unsuccessful attempts to clear the INSS queue. The first was in 2018, during the government of former president Michel Temer.

In August 2019, the administration before Rolim launched a task force. The goal was to end the wait until December of the same year, but it also failed.

The focus, in these two attempts, was to increase the productivity of INSS servers.

Plan to reset INSS queue:

• extend the automatic analysis of requests for benefits, such as retirement and pensions
• remote assessment of the social profile of those applying for the BPC (assistance benefit aimed at the needy population)
• renew contracts for temporary servers and those assigned by other bodies

Waiting line

• The queue is formed when an application to the INSS remains for more than 45 days in response.
• Today the INSS has 1.8 million requests to be analyzed. Of this total, approximately 900 thousand are overdue for more than 45 days. The other half is on schedule.