Pension reform 2 years ago, with a queue at the INSS and distant retirement

The Social Security reform, which made Brazilians postpone their retirement, reduced the value of pensions for death and opened the way for state and municipal reforms, completes two years this Saturday (13). But the problems remain.

Aiming to reduce spending on Social Security, the federal reform updated rules and calculations for benefits, but it has not yet addressed the queue of analyzes or the deficit.

For lawyers specializing in pension law, the Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult for the scenario to improve, but the lack of debates and studies on the social impact of the reform raises doubts about its effectiveness in the future.

“The big discussion was to insert the minimum age in the contribution period. We had some problems in this reform, for example the non-creation of transition rules in the calculation of the benefit, the forgetting of the creation of the minimum divisor in scheduled retirements, which is generating this controversy of the unique contribution, says the lawyer Roberto de Carvalho Santos, president of Ieprev (Institute of Social Security Studies.

If, on the one hand, retirement has become more distant for most Brazilians, who will have to wait until they reach the minimum age or until they meet one of the transition rules, on the other hand, those who need to retire still face a line that resists decreasing.

According to the INSS (National Social Security Institute), in November 2019, when the reform was approved, the analysis queue was 2.19 million and, in 2021, the number of requests waiting for a response from the INSS was in the range of 1.8 million and 1.9 million.

Currently, the waiting has 1.85 million policyholders. Of this total, there are 761,022 inspections scheduled for the next few days in Brazil, according to the Undersecretary of the Federal Medical Inspection.

“Due to the flood of demand due to the reform, as well as the complexity of the analyses, which now take into account many more factors, such as pre-reform acquired right, previous and subsequent legislation, there is a very big delay in the INSS analyses, says lawyer Atila Abella, co-founder of lawtech Social Security.

“Thus, the benefits are taking much longer to be granted, and the amounts are almost always disappointing”, he adds.

break in the accounts

Regarding the deficit of the RGPS (General Regime of Social Security), the Ministry of Labor and Social Security states that, in 2020, the result was R$ 259.1 billion. In 2019, it was BRL 213.2 billion. By proposing the reform, the Ministry of Economy projected to save R$ 800 billion with the new rules and up to R$ 1 trillion, in a decade.

“This reform was carried out in a very hasty way. There is an economy, but there is a liability of 1.8 million dammed benefits. What will be the expenditure in this economy? We still don’t know”, says Santos.

“It was a not-so-relevant economy, due to the damage suffered by society as a whole. The reform has to be thought of in ten years, 20 years. Of course, with the transition rules, the more time passes, the more people do not they will manage to retire for them, then they will have to retire at 62 and 65 years of age and we will have a greater reduction in this deficit. analyzes the lawyer.

For the president of the IBDP (Brazilian Institute of Social Security Law), Adriane Bramante, the deficit continues because there was a lot of pension for death due to the pandemic and a lot of unemployment, with less revenue.

​​The change in the granting of the death pension is one of the most negative aspects of the reform, according to specialists. “It now has four reducers: there is no discard of the 20% lowest contribution salaries, there is the reducer if the insured was not retired, the reducer for the number of dependents and another if the person already receives an INSS benefit and will accumulate “, says João Badari.

“It’s a benefit you don’t foresee. You don’t plan anyone’s death. It’s very unfair to make this 40% reduction in the pension amount. Some rules needed to be changed, while others needed to be maintained for the sake of social justice’, says Santos.

For lawyer Rômulo Saraiva, the transition rules harmed part of the Brazilians who were about to retire. “Many were surprised by the increase of several years to reach the retirement goal. The reform ended up making the insured work harder to receive the same thing or even less compared to the old rules.”

“A reform that was planned to ‘save’ R$1 trillion in ten years does not bring positive points for policyholders. Saving, in this case, means making access to benefits difficult and/or decreasing their value”, says Abella.

In the vision of social protection and social security rights, there was a major setback. With regard to access requirements and calculations, almost all are worse than the rules prior to EC 103/2019. The cases in which the calculation according to the new rules can be more advantageous to the insured are very rare”, he says.