TBH, most government bureaucracy is just pure overhead connected to a jobs program.
A competent government, focused on delivering the services that citizens are actually entitled to, not on paying clerks or avoiding career-ending events at all costs, would do most of this digitally. And by digitally, I don't mean "you can fill the form online, maybe with some auto-fill and autocomplete suggestions for addresses", I mean just sending you the transfer if you're eligible, automatically fetching all the info they need to see if that is the case. If there even is a form, that's too much overhead.
Even Estonia (and other tech-forward EU governments) don't do this. Poland is considered pretty good on the digital front, but many digital processes still result in a (digitally-transmitted) form being printed in some obscure processing center and manually processed by a clerk during business hours.
In my understanding when it comes to doling out benefits, it's not an overhead connected to a jobs program. The less eligible people use benefits, the less the government has to pay out benefits. It's strictly better for the government to make getting benefits as hard as possible.
> It's strictly better for the government to make getting benefits as hard as possible.
iunno, even when they bother to do means-testing in my jurisdiction, they exclude any slightly illiquid assets, regardless of size.
Have a paid off house (any value), paid off motor vehicle (any value) and a corporate pension plan you can start collecting in X years? No problem! You still qualify for long-term social assistance if your income is low as long as your on-paper deposits/investments are also low.
No vehicle/home/pension but your main asset is your self-funded retirement account? You gotta cash that out first. What could you possibly need that for?
I'd get it in the short-term, but the government seems to make it easiest for itself.
In practice, the government spends far more trying to prevent the boogeyman of people who "shouldn't" get benefits receiving them than any actual fraud would ever cost.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
One could argue that by making benefits hard to access, you under-provision and over-reward. This makes fraud more lucrative getting you into a viscous cycle. Normal people less likely to use benefits and dedicated fraudsters more likely.