What The Hell America!

When Josélia de Brito, a former sugarcane worker from a remote town in northeast Brazil, filed for her retirement benefits through the mandated government app, she expected her claim would be processed quickly. Instead, her request was instantly turned down because the system identified her as a man.

It was especially frustrating for de Brito, who had been requesting sick pay for years via the National Social Security Institute’s artificial intelligence-powered app, Meu INSS. De Brito had worked in the fields since she was a teenager, and suffered from a herniated disc, scoliosis, and fibromyalgia — chronic illnesses that made her eligible for social benefits. But even minor errors in her claims filed through the app had led to numerous rejections, with few options for recourse.

“I have all the documents proving my health condition, proving everything, and [the benefit] still gets denied. It’s a humiliation,” de Brito, 55, who is illiterate and had to ask her daughter to file the claims, told Rest of World. It’s very hard on rural workers, in particular, who “have worked for so much time,” she said.

Brazil’s social security institute, known as INSS, added AI to its app in 2018 in an effort to cut red tape and speed up claims. The office, known for its long lines and wait times, had around 2 million pending requests for everything from doctor’s appointments to sick pay to pensions to retirement benefits at the time. While the AI-powered tool has since helped process thousands of basic claims, it has also rejected requests from hundreds of people like de Brito — who live in remote areas and have little digital literacy — for minor errors.

The government is right to digitize its systems to improve efficiency, but that has come at a cost, Edjane Rodrigues, secretary for social policies at the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture, told Rest of World.

“If the government adopts this kind of service to speed up benefits for the people, this is good. We are not against it,” she said. But, particularly among farm workers, claims can be complex because of the nature of their work, she said, referring to cases that require additional paperwork, such as when a piece of land is owned by one individual but worked by a group of families. “There are many peculiarities in agriculture, and rural workers are being especially harmed” by the app, according to Rodrigues.

“Each automated decision is based on specified legal criteria, ensuring that the standards set by the social security legislation are respected,” a spokesperson for INSS told Rest of World. “Automation does not work in an arbitrary manner. Instead, it follows clear rules and regulations, mirroring the expected standards applied in conventional analysis.”

Governments across Latin America have been introducing AI to improve their processes. Last year, Argentina began using ChatGPT to draft court rulings, a move that officials said helped cut legal costs and reduce processing times. Costa Rica has partnered with Microsoft to launch an AI tool to optimize tax data collection and check for fraud in digital tax receipts. El Salvador recently set up an AI lab to develop tools for government services.

But while some of these efforts have delivered promising results, experts have raised concerns about the risk of officials with little tech know-how applying these tools with no transparency or workarounds. El Salvador, for example, ranked poorly in governance and ethics, infrastructure, and human capital in Oxford Insights’ 2024 Government AI Readiness Index. Elsewhere, AI-powered systems from the Netherlands to India have been blamed for surveillance and denial of welfare benefits.

In Brazil, AI is being used to track truancy among schoolchildren, provide biometrics for citizen services, and power a chatbot that explains government files. The Meu INSS app was created by Dataprev, a state-owned company that provides technological solutions, in particular its social programs. It uses computer vision — a field of AI that enables computers to understand images — and natural language processing to scan data in documents uploaded by policyholders. 

In January, Dataprev announced it would invest roughly $10.5 million to enhance the app’s data analysis and fraud detection capabilities. A month later, it introduced a new AI feature to further personalize its offerings for users. The INSS aims to have 55% of all the filings it receives through its AI-powered app by the end of 2025. But some users are worried that greater reliance on this technology will condemn them to an even more labyrinthine process.

Users who are unhappy with the decisions can appeal through an internal board of legal resources — which must also be done via Meu INSS. They wait, on average, 278 days to get a response, according to the INSS.

The system has improved: There were around 34,300 denied benefits for rural workers in January, down from around 53,400 a year prior. But it is still not capable of analyzing the more complex filings of agricultural workers and those whose jobs entail more hazardous conditions and additional paperwork, Rodrigues said. Many such petitions filed by rural workers are denied — these cases should be reviewed by a human instead, she said. 

“A number of them are not registered in these [government] databases, or do not have enough [data] there,” Jane Berwanger, director at the Brazilian Institute for Social Security Law, a civil rights institution, told Rest of World. If these claims are not reviewed manually, they “will turn into legal battles just because they were not correctly or sufficiently analyzed.”

The app allows users to fix information that might have been incorrect in their earlier petitions, the INSS spokesperson told Rest of World. Some policyholders have been misusing the program, filing multiple requests in the hopes of obtaining different results, the spokesperson said.

Meu INSS, which has almost 84 million hits every month, has been praised by the International Social Security Association as a “success story in the digital transformation policy” in Brazil. But the app remains out of reach for some of the most vulnerable workers in the country, and may be leaving them further behind, analysts warned.

Illiteracy in Brazil’s rural areas was nearly 15% in 2022, three times higher than in urban zones. “People out here cannot [even] work with Gmail, Facebook, Instagram,” Francisco Santana, president of the Union for Rural Workers at Barra do Corda, in the state of Maranhão, told Rest of World. “Processes are [getting] more and more automated, and society wasn’t made ready for it, especially further away, in the outskirts, for people that live in rural areas.”

For de Brito, the launch of the app was at first a relief, since the nearest INSS office was a four-hour bus ride away. But even on the handful of occasions the platform did approve her requests for sick pay, which amounted to about $260 a month, de Brito had to wait as long as four months for the institute to set up a medical examination to prove her condition. The results of the tests — scheduled in different cities that often required her to travel all day — were usually delayed, leaving de Brito waiting even longer for her benefit payment to come through, she said.

The rejected retirement claim she had filed in February was approved in March — but only because of a connection she had at the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture, she said. Her case went straight to INSS directors, who identified and corrected the mistake in the app.

“If I had to request [benefits] again, I wouldn’t do it through the app as it is too intricate, and really bad,” de Brito said. “I don’t like it that much.”