In February 2020, Adonisvaldo Cordeiro, 63, filed his retirement request with the INSS. In his more than 40 years of work, he has worked in family farming and in a mining company, both in Bahia, and as a storekeeper at a company in São Paulo. However, nine months later, his request was rejected because the INSS did not recognize the time of rural work, but Adonisvaldo appealed.
Since December 2020, the request has been processed by the Social Security Resources Board. According to experts, the queues for resources usually take between a year and a half and two years.
Data from October 2021 obtained by the IBDP (Brazilian Institute of Social Security Law) points out that requests take, on average, 411 days to be judged at the Social Security Appeals Council, the CRPS. Sought by the report, the INSS did not inform the number of people in the queue or the waiting time for an administrative appeal to be completed.
Like Adonisvaldo, reader Moacir Bricola, 64, had to wait two years and ten months between applying for the benefit and granting it. Its benefit was initially rejected due to errors in the documentation of the special period and, when it was approved by the Board of Appeals, it took another eight months for implementation.
Specialists point out that the delay is mainly due to bottlenecks in the administrative structure, since there is a lack of professionals in the Appeals Council to analyze the demand. The INSS is studying the implementation of a robot for the Appeals Council, which could organize the documentation and reduce the administrative work of the counselors, with the objective of leaving more time for the trial.
The president of Ieprev (Institute of Social Security Studies), Roberto de Carvalho Santos, believes that the decisions of the Judgment Chamber lack transparency, because, without the disclosure of the decisions, it is difficult for the insured to decide whether it is more advantageous for his case to appeal administratively or judicially.
According to the 27th Social Security Statistical Bulletin, in the first three months of 2022 alone, more than 1.14 million requests for benefits were denied across the country (practically half of the total). As of 2020, there are more than 10 million. Anyone who believes that there was injustice in the denial of a benefit has 30 days to file an appeal at the INSS agency, through the Meu INSS website or via Correios.
The appeals can be processed through different instances of the CRPS, which is an independent body of the INSS. That is, the appeals will not be judged by the same servers that initially rejected the request.
After the benefit is denied, the insured files his defense, which will be sent to the Board of Appeals, the first instance of the CRPS, where, often, the judgment is postponed because the documentation of the process is not complete. When everything is ready, the Board judges the appeal, and the INSS can accept it or not. If the INSS disagrees with the decision of the Board, the case will be processed in the second instance, in the Judgment Chamber, in Brasília.
The law sets the maximum period for each instance of 30 days, extendable for another 30 days. Thus, the maximum period that an appeal could take to be finalized would be 120 days, or about four months.
INSS grants the benefit to the reader after contacting the report
After contacting Sheetthe INSS informed, in a note, that Moacir Bricola’s appeal had already been judged and granted by the 13th Social Security Appeals Board.
“The INSS agreed with the decision of the Board of Appeals and granted Mr. Moacir’s retirement on March 25, 2022, with payment retroactively to May 31, 2019,” the agency said in a statement. “The insured can obtain the concession letter and the benefit payment statement through the INSS’s remote channels (site meu.inss.gov.br, Meu INSS mobile application and by phone 135).”
Regarding the case of Adonisvaldo Cordeiro, the INSS reported that the process is with the Board of Appeals and is awaiting a decision to be scheduled. The body informed that the Appeals Council is an autonomous body with its own regiment. “The appeal processes are analyzed and included in the judgment agenda according to the chronological order of distribution.”
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