This is not a welfare program for needy people. It’s a transactional arrangement with specific terms for college and graduate-school educated people. The government should be able to expect that the applicants will be able to dot their Is and cross their Ts.

Spoken like someone who has never found themselves in the insane loops that a bureaucracy can throw you into, with contradictory news coming from multiple parties.

Why are there any Is to dot and Ts to cross at all? Why isn't the application:

  Name: _________________
  Taxpayer ID: __________

? The government should be able to figure out from that what government loans you have that are eligible for the program, and if you've satisfied ongoing payment requirements. They should be able to figure out from your income tax returns if you are working in a qualifying public service job.

As it turns out, random government agencies can’t just data mine your tax returns, bank accounts, and payment history from a third party servicer.

To build the infrastructure to do this would cost the government probably $100 billion. See healthcare.gov for an example where they tried to do something similar.

Healthcare.gov was insanely successful after the initial poor launch (the initial launch was poor only because the Supreme Court struck down certain aspects of the law, which meant that the entire scope of healthcare.gov changed overnight).

... Look outside the US. This is how a lot of social programs work. Especially if it were for a Public Servant/Employee then the records are even easier to access.

Perhaps the US’s relative state independence doesn’t help it here.

I haven’t used PSLF, but the IBr system does in fact do stuff like pull your income and loan information from the relevant government data bases when you certify your income each year.

The issue here is not filling in the forms properly, but people failing to look carefully at the underlying requirements for eligibility and make sure they meet them.