Following a report by EL TIEMPO, the Ministry of Labor expands the number of decongestion rooms for disability assessment.

The backlog in disability assessment in Colombia has reached a breaking point. More than 17,000 cases without a decision, nearly 4,000 pending appeals, and hundreds of cases backed up in the offices of the Pension Fund Administrators (AFP) and Occupational Risk Administrators (ARL) reveal a bottleneck that directly affects thousands of citizens awaiting a decision to access pensions, compensation, and social security benefits.

Faced with this situation, the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca intervened and, through a class action, ordered the continuation of the decongestion chambers of the National Disability Qualification Board, provisionally created in 2024. The Ministry of Labor, through Resolution 3458 of September 1, 2025, complied with this order and extended the validity of these chambers until a final ruling is issued. This was revealed in a report presented by the newspaper EL TIEMPO: Read it here.

Decongestion rooms are additional teams of the National Disability Assessment Board, created to support the main rooms in assessing loss of work capacity. Their function is to issue opinions on backlogged cases, ensuring greater agility in the process.

In 2024, the Ministry of Labor opened these rooms on a temporary basis, initially for nine months, while the merit-based competition to fill permanent positions was underway. However, the magnitude of the problem exceeded all expectations: between January and May 2025 alone, more than 14,600 cases were distributed, of which 5,338 were handled by the decongestion rooms.

The Court was clear: the courtrooms cannot be closed while the backlog persists. In its ruling of April 24, 2025, it noted that "there are still thousands of unresolved cases and the timeframes established by law for issuing rulings are not being met," and therefore extended the effects of the precautionary measure.

Furthermore, the courts required the Ministry to adopt intervention and verification mechanisms to ensure the distribution of cases is equitable, transparent, and public, preventing the effort to decongest cases from reproducing the same problems of concentration and backlog.

The Ministry of Labor formalized its compliance with the court's decision with five key points:

Continuity: The decongestion chambers will continue to operate until a final judgment is issued. Equality of conditions: their members will have the same rights, fees, and obligations as those of the main chambers; unified numbering (they are organically integrated into the Board's structure, with no distinction between main and decongestion chambers); equitable distribution (all cases must be distributed among the chambers according to transparency criteria); and proportionality; and notification and control (the Occupational Risk Directorate must inform and ensure compliance with the measures).

Although the measure guarantees service continuity, structural congestion persists. According to figures from the Ministry itself, by the end of June 2025, there were more than 17,000 cases awaiting a decision and an additional 29,000 reported by the ARLs (Regional Transportation Agency), demonstrating that the decongestion rooms are a temporary relief, but not a permanent solution.

Experts warn that unless the National Board's technical capabilities, human talent, and technological management are strengthened, the country will continue to face chronic delays that undermine citizens' confidence in the social security system.

In short, Resolution 3458 of 2025 reflects an unprecedented event: the justice system had to intervene to ensure that the State maintained minimum response mechanisms for a problem affecting thousands of Colombians. Decongestion rooms are now a safety valve in an overloaded system, but the challenge remains structural: how to ensure that disability assessment is truly timely, transparent, and fair.