I began receiving public benefits around 2003. Some of those benefits were granted without any contribution from my side at all. Eventually, when we got into the Section 8 housing and other things, there was a lot of paperwork. The application required gathering together a lot of documentation for my ID, my finances, my household makeup. Initially, it was all manual and on paper, and gradually over those two decades, it moved to electronic online processes.

The case workers and bureaucrats who worked on my case always expressed a lot of relief and encouragement that I was filling out the paperwork well. Being that I could do a lot of things electronically, and use my printer effectively, and just that I already had that mindset where I could fill out lots of forms and collate paperwork from a lot of different sources: I had a distinct leg-up compared to other recipients of public benefits.

A lot of people who are poor, illiterate, ESL, and in stressful living situations are not able to keep up with that paperwork and the bureaucratic requirements, like at all, and that is generally a first-order filter for who's not going to receive the entitlements. However, in my experience, there are usually social workers and specialists available, who can assist in the process, and if someone is in actual need of those benefits, not much will stand in their way of obtaining them.

I have also seen a lot of fraud and waste from the provider side of things. However, I do not believe there is a lot of individual fraud. At least not large-scale stuff. Because it would be difficult to carry through with it. If people are writing up appeals with LLMs, they may already be on a razor's edge of denial. It is definitely a real thing that, if you don't need/deserve the benefits, you can legit get buried in paperwork and dropped into bureaucratic mazes of fool's errands and snipe hunts, and you'll never find the end.

So today, the workflow for entitlements and benefits has moved to a completely electronic, online one, and so anyone who can navigate websites and collate PDFs and fill out web forms, these are the people uniquely advantaged to make use of those benefits. It's great that an LLM can write a cogent appeal and a rationale now. I suppose that the government will find themselves summarizing those with LLMs as well. Good luck!