Social Security wants automatic granting of benefit after favorable appeal to INSS insured

Minister Wolney Queiroz tells the report that he ordered Dataprev and INSS to provide a technological solution that allows the automatic implementation of the collegiate's decisions. Under the current design, the insured even wins, but does not always receive it: the process goes to a separate queue, where it waits until a server completes the granting of the benefit.

Today, according to the government, there are 336,800 cases whose appeals have already been decided in favor of the insured, but the effects, such as the payment of a new benefit or the increase in the value of an existing retirement or pension, have not yet been implemented.

The INSS had up to 30 days to enforce the terms of the board's decision, a period that was extended this year to 60 days, but, in practice, the wait has been longer. In the second quarter of 2026, the average processing time in the conclusion phase, when the CRPS has already analyzed the merits of the appeal, was 130 days.

The delay comes at the end of a process that is already quite lengthy. From April to June this year, an appeal took, on average, 48 days to be sent by the INSS to the CRPS, 1,413 days for the institute to carry out steps, such as collecting documents, and 140 days for judgment at the council. Only then does the implementation phase begin.

"People always said: 'You tell me to appeal administratively, so as not to go to court, I go all the way through the CRPS, I win and I don't take it, because the CRPS doesn't implement the decision'", says the minister.

"She [the insured] wins, and then [the INSS] spends months implementing it. It's counterproductive, and people are taken to the Judiciary. We're going to implement this in the coming months", he states, without committing to a deadline for the change.

The attempt is not new. Since last year, the INSS had been discussing instruments to give the council the power to set the parameters of the benefit, without having to wait for the institute's employees. However, the solution has not yet come to fruition.

"The INSS says that the system needs to be improved, Dataprev [the state company responsible for the Social Security systems] says that there are obstacles that belong to the INSS. Let's bring the three together [Dataprev, INSS and the ministry] to find out where the problem is", says Queiroz.

Strengthening the CRPS is part of the government's strategy to try to reduce the INSS waiting list and the judicialization of benefits.

After the stock of initial requests broke the record of 3.1 million applications at the beginning of 2026, in an election year, the Executive launched a task force to intensify analyzes and try to prevent the issue from becoming a source of criticism of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) during the campaign.

But the government also decided to act at the front door and limited the making of new requests by those who had a first request rejected for 30 days.

Previously, in the government's assessment, the absence of restrictions opened gaps for policyholders to file new benefit requests even before any appeal. The agencies considered this factor as one of the causes for the increase in queues.

In the minister's view, the government needs to resolve the bottleneck in implementing CRPS decisions to make it effective and, thus, reduce the number of new requests and also the incidence of legal proceedings.

While this does not happen, the government continues to focus on paying bonuses to INSS employees to ensure a more intense pace of analysis.

At the end of July, the queue of initial applications to the INSS had fallen to 1.55 million, of which 374 thousand had been awaiting a response for more than 45 days. These are the ones that the government considers backlogged requests. The objective is to clear the dammed stock by the end of September, before the elections.

Partial data up to August 9th shows that the queue continued to fall, with the total number of applications at 1.44 million, of which 317 thousand had been under analysis for more than 45 days.

The accelerated reduction of the queue has aroused criticism from experts, who claim that the government increased rejections as a strategy to reduce, by force, the backlog of requests under analysis. The minister dismisses such conduct and states that denials have increased in absolute numbers, but so have concessions, and this is due to the greater number of completed processes. Proportionally, according to Queiroz, the rejection rate remains close to 50%.

According to data from Beps (Social Security Statistical Bulletin), considering the completed processes, the rejection rate went from 41.6% last year to 50.5% in the first half of 2026.

The increase was driven by disability benefits, which include sickness benefit, whose rejection rate went from 39% to 53% in the same period. In other benefits, such as retirement and pensions, denials accounted for 45.9% in 2025 and 46.2% in the first six months of this year.

According to the minister, two factors help to explain the phenomenon. One of them was the actions of 224 medical experts who, according to Social Security, were denying applications "well above average" and without due justification. Between April and July, 694 thousand requests were rejected without a specified reason.

"They were all suspended, and these processes had to be reanalyzed", says Queiroz, who saw an orchestrated action by experts to influence the numbers.

The second factor would be what the minister calls the lawsuit industry.

"All those people who were involved in the labor sector, those lawyers, a large part or the majority of them migrated to the social security system. It became an industry. You see lawyers promising to retire the person, to get the benefit on their own. Sometimes, the person thinks that by going in anyway they will get the benefit granted", he says.

According to the minister, taking the discussion away from J