Meu INSS's Automated Benefit Engine — Brazil's AI Denies Over Half of Fully Electronic Retirement Claims, TCU Finds

Since the mid-2020s, Brazil's national social security institute (INSS) has used an automated concession engine on its Meu INSS portal to grant or deny retirement, disability and other benefit claims. The engine cross-checks the claimant's data against the Cadastro Nacional de Informacoes Sociais (CNIS) database alone, without requesting or weighing any supplementary evidence a claimant may have attached.

To speed up processing of retirement, disability and other social-security claims submitted through the Meu INSS platform by granting or denying them automatically from database records, without manual case review.

The system cross-checks each fully electronic claim against the CNIS database and returns an automatic grant or denial. A Tribunal de Contas da Uniao (TCU) operational audit -- Acordao 1.498/2026-Plenario, process TC 007.094/2025-6 -- reviewed this flow for claims processed entirely electronically in the first half of 2025. Press investigation documented individual claims rejected within minutes, often over a single unchecked box or a rural-work period the system could not interpret from attached documents.

The TCU audit found that of 543,419 claims processed entirely electronically in H1 2025, 280,231 (51.6%) were automatically denied. Separately, INSS's overall pending caseload fell from roughly 3.1 million claims in February 2025 to 2.2 million in May 2025 as automation scaled.

The TCU ruled that the automatic-denial flow creates a 'concrete risk of harm' to claimants, since it gives them no chance to correct database inconsistencies or submit missing evidence before a denial is issued. It ordered INSS, Dataprev and the Ministry of Social Security to redesign the flow within 180 days -- including paying out any uncontested portion of a claim immediately and notifying claimants of unresolved gaps -- and federal courts have separately ordered INSS to reopen specific cases for manual review. The throughput gains are real, but the audit frames them as a direct trade-off against claimants' due-process rights.