Source: Zero Hora - RS - VIVER - 28/08/2009

With the help of the available communication and information technology, the National Institute of Social Security (INSS) is undoing the old image of a slow and disorganized public agency that charges badly, oversees badly and renders bad service when the insured person he appeals for any benefit. Recent administrative and managerial achievements - based on computerized systems and, certainly, on functional recycling - allow, for example, that retirements be granted in a few minutes, with a scheduled day and time, or that the INSS itself alerts workers when their retirement is over. can be requested. In this sense, the institute released this week another batch of correspondence warning more than 1,3 thousand urban workers that they have acquired conditions to claim this benefit.

This is an advance that enhances the social insurance system established in Brazil, even if such efficiency is not yet verified in all areas, nor does it cover the entire structure of an organization that manages 11 different benefits, ranging from pensions to pensions. due to death, from family allowance to accident allowance and sickness allowance, among others. Each of them requires a complex administrative structure and adequate inspection, both so that citizens are served with quality and to prevent profiteers from defrauding the system and harming its beneficiaries.

The efficiency shown in this area of ​​Social Security - and in some other public service agencies - needs to be considered as an example to be followed. Public bureaucracy, which has been the target of historic criticisms and sometimes undue generalizations, deserves a positive highlight whenever, as in the case of pensions, it manages to overcome inertia and inefficiency and produces results that society cannot but praise . In the specific case of Social Security, which encompasses and manages that which is the biggest individual factor in the deficit of Brazilian public accounts, the quality of the service imposes itself as a duty.