Lula government claims to have cleared the INSS queue, despite 235,000 late applications

The government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) changed the INSS (National Social Security Institute) queue criteria to announce that the wait for the benefit was zero, even with 235,000 requests unanswered for more than 45 days — a cutoff that the Executive itself had been adopting to classify an application as late.

At an event attended by the president at Palácio do Planalto, minister Wolney Queiroz (Social Security) said that the number of pending applications fell to 1.252 million on August 31, while the number of new monthly applications reached 1.394 million last month.

As the stock of orders was below the flow of new applications, the government's understanding is that this is enough to say that the queue has been cleared. In the document presented at the event, the government stated: "we have achieved queue-free service".

"Today, there are fewer people waiting for a response than the requests we received in August. We are analyzing 1.2 million processes, and it is important to detail this number a little: 640 thousand requests are super-recent, 378 thousand are waiting for the citizen to present a missing document, and 235 thousand have been waiting for a response for more than 45 days", said the president of the INSS, Ana Cristina Silveira.

She said that requests that have been waiting for more than 45 days fell 87% compared to January (when they were 1.9 million) and that a part of them corresponds to "cases of greater complexity, which require careful analysis and which will always exist in an institution the size of the INSS". According to Silveira, the agency created specific working groups for such cases.

"Even so, we can categorically state that there is no queue for initial service, as the number of requests being analyzed today is lower than the new processes that entered in August," he added.

In a speech, President Lula criticized those who attribute responsibility for the deficit in the country's accounts to Social Security. "[They say] 'The deficit is because of Social Security'. No, the deficit is because we have to pay R$1.3 trillion in interest every year. I never accepted passing the responsibility onto Social Security. I never accepted it and I won't accept it," he declared.

The president also said that he needed a woman to fix Social Security, in reference to the head of the institute, appointed by Lula in April this year. She replaced Gilberto Waller Jr., who had taken over the institute at the end of April 2025 after the association discounts scandal, but maintained a turbulent relationship with the leadership of the Ministry of Social Security. The government used the theme of reducing the queue as motivation to make the change.

“Little by little, women are convincing me that they are more competent than men,” he said.

After the ceremony, the Social Security Minister was questioned by journalists about the numbers and said that there had been no change in the queue criteria. He stated that the 235,000 requests are a "waste that has no impact on the gigantic number" of requests.

"We haven't changed any criteria. We are appreciating, analyzing requests like we've never analyzed, and we're granting benefits like we've never granted. These are real numbers. So there's no trick, there's no catch," he said.

As Folha showed in June, the government set the goal of clearing the INSS's backlogged requests by the end of September, on the eve of the presidential elections, given the concern that the issue would be exploited by the opposition to erode the PT member's image.

At that time, the criterion was to eliminate the backlog of applications awaiting analysis for more than 45 days.

In interviews following these numbers, both the president of the INSS and the Minister of Social Security also focused on this statistic to illustrate the evolution of the government's work to reduce the waiting period for policyholders.

After the publication of this text, the Ministry of Social Security sent a note saying that it did not change criteria to say that the INSS queue had been cleared.

"The concept of queue-free service presented by the government considers the institute's ability to analyze more processes monthly than the volume of new applications received. In July, for example, 1.435 million requests were received, and the INSS presented 1.658 million responses. The total stock, which reached 3.1 million processes, fell to 1.25 million and is now within the agency's monthly analysis capacity", says the note.

According to the ministry, the 235,000 applications that have been waiting for more than 45 days were informed by the government itself and "continue to be treated as a priority, including by teams dedicated to more complex cases".

"Therefore, there was no change in criteria to artificially produce a result. What happened was a significant reduction in liabilities and an increase in the response capacity of the INSS, which today is able to process more applications than it receives."

Last week, during a hearing on Jornal Nacional, the president said that he would announce this week that the queue was closed.

Reducing the queue became a government priority at the beginning of this year, after the accumulated stock of orders renewed records month after month, reaching a peak of 3.1 million in January 2026 — even above the levels observed during the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL), when it reached 2 million.

At the event, Queiroz said that the president had given him the mission of reestablishing the credibility of the INSS and "leaving no one behind."

At the ceremony, he also stated that the number of INSS services has exceeded the processes that enter the system. In July, for example, 1.4 million new requests were received and the agency says it responded to 1.6 million. According to the INSS, the average wait is around 34 days.