INSS takes down report demonstrating how the Bolsonaro government benefited Contag with 30,000 in irregular discounts
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The National Social Security Institute (INSS) removed from its official website this Wednesday (20) an audit report that demonstrates how the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) acted to benefit the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (Contag), an entity close to the PT, with thousands of undue discounts on pensions ( see image below ).
The report, prepared by the INSS Auditor General's Office, was published on the agency's website on Wednesday morning. The document was removed in the early afternoon, a few hours after the INSS Joint Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPMI) opened its proceedings, in which the Lula administration suffered a defeat to the opposition in the election of the president and rapporteur.
The report's removal also occurred shortly after the website of the magazine "Piauí" published a report on the document.
The order to remove the report came from the president of the INSS, Gilberto Waller Júnior. Globonews had access to the document.
INSS page offline — Photo: Reproduction/INSS
In a note sent by the agency's press office, the INSS stated that the report had not been completed and was published due to a “procedural error”.
Because of this, its "content has no institutional validity" ( see the full statement at the end of the report ). The report attempted to contact Contag to obtain a statement from the organization, but as of the last update of this text, it had not received a response.
The INSS General Auditor's Office is an internal body with the autonomy to produce audit reports. These documents are produced by the technical team of auditors, without the direct involvement of INSS board members.

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Contag is one of the largest labor unions in the country and exerts significant influence over several ministries in President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's (Workers' Party) administration. The organization is among those that have made the most deductions from pensions in recent years.
The opposition uses the close relationship between Contag and the Workers' Party to try to hold the Planalto Palace responsible for the INSS scandal, but the audit report shows that the entity also had power within the agency during the Bolsonaro administration.
The document shows that on September 28, 2022, in the middle of the election period, the then president of the INSS, Guilherme Serrano, ordered the unblocking, at once, of 30,211 benefits so that Contag could make discounts on retirements and pensions, without the need to prove authorization from the beneficiaries.
At the time, the Minister of Social Security and Labor was José Carlos Oliveira, who chose Serrano to lead the agency. Oliveira took office in March 2022. Prior to that, he was president of the INSS (National Institute of Social Security).
The agency's rules do not provide for the practice of batch unlocking of benefits and require that the retiree previously authorize the unlocking of benefits for association discounts.
Auditors requested supporting documentation from Contag, which authorized the deductions for 3,033 benefits. The entity submitted documentation for 3,028 cases, failing to provide the records for only five retirees.
However, the audit identified thousands of cases of retirees who were in this group and challenged the legality of the discounts.
After the operation that revealed the scandal, another 3,384 retirees included in the group claimed they had not authorized Contag to deduct their monthly payments.
In one case, a beneficiary wrote the following message:
"I was deceived. The union president never informed me about these discounts. He simply asked me to sign some documents, but he didn't tell me what they were or that there would be any discount on my benefits."
In another case, a retiree claims: "I was deceived. I retired through the union and they didn't tell me they were going to do this."
In addition to the challenges to the discounts, there were another 1,336 cases in which beneficiaries requested that their benefits be blocked again, that is, that they be “shielded” again from the associative discounts.
The auditors concluded that "the controls established by the INSS to ensure procedural compliance, such as the unblocking service offered through remote channels and service units, were disregarded in the batch unblocking process. This compromised the traceability, transparency, and effectiveness of operational safeguards, exacerbating the identified impacts."
Another audit report, prepared in 2024, had already identified the practice of batch releases to benefit Contag. At that time, they discovered the release, all at once, on November 1, 2023, of 34,500 benefits for the purposes of deductions. This batch had already been released during the Lula administration, when the INSS was headed by Alessandro Stefanutto.
Of the almost 35 thousand blocked benefits, in only 213 (1.7% of the total) did retirees state that they had, in fact, authorized the associative discount.
Documents from the Federal Police and the CGU (Office of the Comptroller General of the Union) regarding the INSS fraud scheme cite batch unblocking as one of the illegal practices found during the investigations.
Auditors identified a difference between the two batch release cases. In 2023, Contag's request was formalized in the INSS's Electronic Information System (SEI), in accordance with the legal procedure. It contains all the official letters with the entity's requests and the agency's responses.
During the 2022 unblocking process, auditors found no record within the SEI process, indicating that the negotiations were conducted outside of official INSS procedures. The agency's technicians were only able to discover the batch unblocking because they found a request made by an INSS employee to Dataprev, the public company that manages the agency's systems.
The request, registered as "DM.101310," was filed by Ingrid Ambrozio Camillo, general payments coordinator, on behalf of Guilherme Serrano, then-INSS president. "Considering the email received from Contag on September 13, 2022, with authorization from the INSS President, I request the unblocking of the attached benefits so that discounts can be made in favor of the aforementioned entity."
Request to unlock benefits — Photo: Reproduction/Dataprev
The auditors conclude that “the batch release occurred without any formalization that would justify the legal and factual assumptions that led the INSS to authorize, in disagreement with the current norm, the procedure through demand DM.101310, as the prior, personal and specific authorization of the holders of the affected benefits was not proven, as alleged by the insured themselves”, says an excerpt from the report.
"The page in question was taken offline because it contained content whose preparation had not been completed by the responsible authorities, but which ended up being published on the INSS portal due to a procedural error. Therefore, its content has no value as an institutional document of the INSS, which does not attest to the veracity and integrity of the information contained therein."
Globo