The institution does not have any automatic mechanism to inform it of the death of a citizen outside of the country. This is why beneficiaries living outside of the country are obliged to submit proof of life in order to avoid the suspension of their benefit payments.

Uruguay’s Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) manages the National System of Labour Certification, (Sistema Nacional de Certificación Laboral – SNCL), which centralizes the register of medical leave certificates for active workers for social security purposes.

The information technology (IT) service of the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) of Uruguay has developed a robot – its aim is to automate, speed up and enhance the efficiency of processes for receiving requests for help, with regard to IT issues and/or citizen applications concerning benefits at moments when the institute’s call centre is experiencing high demand or is overwhelmed (i.e. the current pandemic, tax responsibilities falling due or the issuance of new benefits, etc.).

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a challenge as the world has had to face situations unthinkable at a time when global technology and communication are distinctive elements of society. As in the past, solutions for fighting the disease have included lockdown, social distancing, quarantine and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE).

In accordance with the health emergency decreed by the government and with state policies, our mutual fund, the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista), has since mid-March, been implementing a strategic plan to combat and control the COVID-19 pandemic.

Certain actions have been carried out to minimise the risk to the institution’s workers.

Eliminating paper from our desks: A utopian dream? No, it can be done, and not at any cost, by creating jobs for young people and making the right investment for the times we live in.

The recipe for success includes planning, the right to make mistakes and recalculations, the achievement of guarantees and the realisation that we cannot ignore the path the organisation has been on, as, in our job, history matters.

The complexity of and demand for services in the field of information and communication technologies (ITC) that underpin the achievement of the institutional objectives of the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) of Uruguay have grown systematically and increasingly rapidly over the years.

As the BPS’s pension coverage addresses contingencies that arise in the course of a citizen’s life, from birth to death, it has a very high social impact.

Modernisation and the use of new technologies by taxpayers make the job of the comptroller, which is to ensure greater inclusion in social security, increasingly difficult. There is a need, therefore, to improve management through innovation and the use of disruptive technologies and optimised procedures, which enable more efficient and effective control, with the aim of promoting better fiscal behaviour and ensuring the inclusion of many more workers.

The Social Protection Longitudinal Survey (Encuesta Longitudinal de Protección Social – ELPS) was part of the “support program for better management of the social protection system”, which aims to strengthen the capacity to formulate and implement policies on social security, education, housing, employment, health, disability, and care among other things. Therefore, the conditions and capacities required to continue with future ELPS phases were generated, with the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) as the managing institution.

Special Assistance (Ayuda Extraordinaria – AYEX) is a non-contributory benefit provided by the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS), aimed at responding to the socio-educational needs of persons with disabilities covered by the social security system.

The purpose of the benefit is to enable persons to regain skills, compensate lost functions and obtain a maximum degree of autonomy and a better quality of life, with their abilities and aspirations.

Over the past few years, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has been promoting and exploring the possibility of using public software rather than creating a new system or issuing a call for tenders to acquire one, with the aim of making optimum use of government resources and to avoid “reinventing the wheel”. The term “public software” is used to describe any piece of software that has been developed using government resources and that should therefore be available for the different government organizations to share.

E-training has come to the fore as a means of enabling training programmes to be offered to the organization’s officials on a large scale. Until now, the method has relied on so-called Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), and more specifically the Moodle platform, which is used by the institution.

The aim is to improve this training method by adopting videoconferencing as an e-training tool, using synchronous techniques to enable real-time interaction between speakers in different locations and, with other strategies, to replicate on-site courses.

As part of its policies to promote a social security institution that is more effective and efficient and closer to the people, allowing their quality of life to be improved, a strategy for multi-channel services has been drawn up with the aim of offering citizens different channels of customer service depending on their needs.

The portal was generated in order to provide, in a single location accessible in a secure manner (user ID and password), a range of information for various groups wanting to exchange data with the Bank Employees’ Pension Fund (Caja de Jubilaciones y Pensiones Bancarias – CJPB), namely:

Often, the interests of workers and employers are not the same, so addressing absenteeism as it relates to the health and safety of workers is an ethical and social commitment.

This good practice aims to reduce absenteeism arising from respiratory, musculoskeletal, mental and cardiac diseases, which are among the most frequent conditions among workers of the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista – CCOUM).

The Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social ‒ BPS) has developed measures to discourage the non-compliance of those paying social security contributions and to promptly recover debts by applying controls that discourage the adoption of irregular behaviour.

The Contributor Profiling System (Calificación Tributaria) is a model that describes each contributor as a function of the possible risks in their dealings with BPS from the time of their admission to the scheme, as derived from coefficients of trustworthiness based on their past behaviour.

Following an analysis of the occupational accident statistics for 2012 from the health institution of the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista), a target was set to reduce the frequency and severity of occupational accidents by at least 15 per cent. To this end, we introduced measures through the Occupational Health and Safety Commission (Comisión de Salud y Seguridad Laboral), which is made up of representatives from both trade unions and institutions.

To be more effective and efficient in the administration of economic benefits, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has implemented an automated solution to manage benefits based on the processing of information and current regulations, and providing access to benefits without requiring beneficiaries to go to customer care centers.

To obtain a benefit, the process begins with the authorized benefit provider completing the requisite information through the available Web functionalities. 

Preventing professional risks requires teamwork and network efforts. Our experience as a Mutual Fund that employs 2,233 officials and provides care services of every sort to approximately 83,000 associates indicates that it is essential to work on the continuous improvement of the promotion, prevention, and health care in the workplace.

The aim of these types of information systems is to offer an overview in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency of these actions, and provide tools for the identification and subsequent analysis in more overarching contexts of the demonstrable consequences for those at the receiving end of the action (the country's population).

It is well known how to manage our regulations, standards, and working guidelines, but:

How do we manage knowledge that is not captured in typical documentary form, but which we systematically need to perform our work?

How do we manage our notebook of “useful facts” which we use for our work?

How do we ensure maximum access to:

In order to be more efficient and effective in detecting irregularities and fraud, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social (BPS)) has built an integrated solution based on the use of modeling techniques and predictive analysis to select taxpayers to be audited (Integrated Solution for the Selection of Cases to Monitor or Solución Integral de Selección de Casos a Fiscalizar (SISCA)).

The Bank Employees' Pension Fund (CJPB) welcomed this opportunity for improvement and entirely restructured its previous system for the collection of contributions, setting up a distance mechanism (internet) based on a secure connection. This presented a number of advantages including the elimination of transfers of cash and highly sensitive information on paper and over-the counter transactions in the presence of the public, using a distance telecommunication system (SICORE) which enables those concerned to carry out all their tasks from home or wherever they choose, via the web.

With the goal of promoting the inclusion of domestic workers in the Uruguayan social security system by incorporating technological tools that facilitate access to information and handling formalities, it proved possible to generate social awareness both among workers to claim their rights and among employers to meet their obligations.

bizSAFE is a five-step programme, developed by the Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) Council which is a statutory body under the Ministry of Manpower, that assists companies to build up their WSH capabilities to achieve quantum improvements in safety and health standards at the workplace (for more information click here

The national reference center for birth defects and rare diseases (Centro de Referencia Nacional de Defectos Congénitos y Enfermedades Raras – CRENADECER) is a unit of the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS). The center for access to assistive technologies (Centro de Acceso a Tecnologías de Apoyo – CATA) is located therein, and its goal is to approach disability in a way that promotes equal opportunities in relation to technology, using computers to assist with rehabilitation.

Among other things, this practice has resulted in having specialist consultants from different fields of IT offering IT management expertise, flexibility and efficiency. Since its inception, none of the technology deployed has been discontinued early due to unexpected results or been deemed inadequate.

To minimize manual labour and errors involved in the conventional labour-intensive method of transcribing data by data entry officers, Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) began actively promoting the use of e submissions in 2000, through various innovative methods catering to the different needs of different employer segments.