The income of a child with a formal contract is included in the BPC calculation, and the family group rule explains why

Being 65 years old does not guarantee the Continuous Payment Benefit, the BPC. A 67-year-old man who lives with his son, who works with a formal contract, discovered this when trying to get the benefit, according to the case reported by O Antagonista. He meets the age, but the request still goes through an economic and registration analysis, and that is where the child's income enters the account.

The BPC is provided for in article 20 of Law 8,742/1993 and pays a minimum wage per month to people aged 65 or over in a low-income situation. To measure this income, the rule does not use the common idea of ​​family. The calculation adds the monthly income of the legal family group and divides the total by the number of members of that group.

According to O Antagonista, the BPC family group has six categories: the applicant, the spouse or partner, the parents (or stepmother and stepfather, in the absence of one of them), single siblings, single children and stepchildren and wards. As a rule, members need to live under the same roof, and kinship alone is not enough. A married son, for example, does not join the group just because he lives with his parents.

The same article records that a person excluded from the group cannot be included just to reduce the income per person. In the case of a single child living in the same house, the salary is normally included in the calculation, which was precisely the point that surprised the applicant.

The Cadastro Único’s definition of family also does not coincide with that of the BPC, and the registry is used in the analysis. Therefore, checking the register is not enough to know how the income will be counted, as each stage may apply a different concept.

For those who follow public accounts, the interest is less in the individual case and more in the design of the rule. Criteria that define who receives a minimum wage benefit weigh on government social spending, a topic dear to those who defend fiscal responsibility. The facts found do not provide data on how many orders are affected nor on the total cost of the program.

What changes for the investor

The facts found do not deal with changes to BPC rules, and the case described shows the application of existing criteria. In theory, the more household income is included in the calculation, the smaller the number of eligible families tends to be, which alleviates public spending. This type of effect is of interest to anyone looking at the trajectory of federal spending, as the perception of the budget can influence interest rates and exchange rates. There is no basis here for predicting prices or adjusting the portfolio, as the impact, if any, depends on numbers that this calculation does not provide.

Automatically translated from Portuguese.