INSS will pay revision of article 29 in May; know how to make the query

The INSS (Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social) will pay for the revision of article 29, also called the revision of aid, between the 1st and 7th of May of this year, according to the social security agency. This is the last batch of the payment schedule defined after an agreement signed between the institute and the Federal Public Ministry and will cover 10,941 beneficiaries.

The correction is due because, between 2002 and 2009, the INSS erred in paying disability benefits. At the time, the agency failed to discard the lowest 20% of contributions in calculating the average salary of workers. The payments involve policyholders who were still receiving the benefit in error in 2012, the year in which the court settlement took place.

The amounts will be released to policyholders who, in 2012:

• They were up to 45 years old in April
• They no longer received the benefit calculated with error
• They were entitled to arrears from BRL 6,000.01

According to the institute, the beneficiary must check if he is in the lot at the end of April, when “the processing of these payments must be completed”, informs the agency. Consultation can be made by calling 135.

The insured will also be able to check if he will be entitled to receive the amounts through the Meu INSS app or website. When accessing the home page informing the CPF and password, the beneficiary must go to the top bar, in blue, where it says “What do you need?” and type the word review. The option “Benefit Review – article 29” will appear.

It is necessary to click on the text and, on the following page, access “Consult Benefit Review – Art. 29”. If you have money receivable, this information will appear. If there are no values, the message will be that the “Consultation to Review Article 29 did not return data to the citizen”.

The review is paid to policyholders who have received sickness or accident benefits, disability retirement or earned a death benefit derived from wrong benefits. The action was filed by the Federal Public Ministry and by Sindnapi (National Union of Retirees and Pensioners of Força Sindical). The agreement allowed the government to spread payments over the years since 2013.

The INSS error reduced the income of the insured. Those who received disability benefits and had less than 144 contributions to the INSS after July 1994 had the calculation made by the institute as follows: all salaries in reais were corrected by the INPC (National Consumer Price Index); the corrected values ​​were added and the average of these values ​​was used to pay the social security income.

According to experts, the calculation should have been done as follows: all salaries in reais would be corrected by the INPC. Afterwards, the INSS would organize the ratio from highest to lowest and discard the lowest 20%. The average salary, then, would be made using the 80% highest salaries; from this average the payment would come out.

Lawyer Tonia Galleti, coordinator of Sindnapi’s legal department, was one of those responsible for the action at the time. “We went to the Public Ministry and filed a joint action. At the time, we managed to reach an agreement so that people could benefit from the payment”, she says.

According to her, several lawyers filed lawsuits, but only the insured who had access to the Judiciary benefited. “We began to see a very high demand from associates and people coming in to carry out this review. As a union, which defends not only associates but the entire category, we look for the Public Ministry to try to make people receive without having to go to court . There was an agreement and the payment was made administratively”, he says.

The lawyer says, however, that there were still policyholders who were left out of the review. Today, there is nothing more to do, as the ten-year period to ask the INSS for income correction has already ended in this case. “Some received the review letter, but did not have the money deposited. Others did not even receive the letter, but if the review is done, they are entitled.”

Reform changed benefit calculation

Since the Social Security reform, in November 2019, the calculation of the new INSS benefits no longer counts on the discard of 20% of the lowest payments for the composition of the average salary, which can reduce the amounts paid by the body to workers with variations wages during the period of contribution to Social Security.

For Tonia, reform is necessary, but the parameter changes involved many new rules harmful to policyholders. “Actually, they always wanted not to have any discards because that brings down the value of the benefit, but they had never immediately achieved so many changes that were harmful to workers.”