Michael Bohmeyer

Germany has legislated extensive poverty relief on paper, yet millions still go without support because the welfare state is too complex, bureaucratic and inefficient – translating to a €45 billion annual eligibility-to-payout gap, and an erosion of trust in institutions and the country’s democratic foundations. After running a universal basic income experiment through Mein Grundeinkommen and legally challenging welfare dysfunction through Sanktionsfrei, Michael Bohmeyer built WeFix.Social as civic infrastructure: a single digital interface between the state and those entitled to welfare, enforcing their rights at scale. In doing so, Michael is fundamentally shifting power dynamics between the welfare state and those who depend on it— creating new intermediary roles, holding the state accountable to its own promises, and rebuilding democratic trust.

Michael’s lifelong commitment to his purpose stems from his conviction that economic security is the key to a stable German society. Over more than a decade, Michael founded three social enterprises, each testing a different pathway to change in how social security is provided. With Mein Grundeinkommen, he made universal basic income tangible and personal at national scale—millions participated, tens of millions of euros were redistributed, and the debate influenced mainstream policy. But when political winds shifted, receptivity proved fragile. With Sanktionsfrei, he tried the opposite posture: give individuals legal tools to fight the often-withholding welfare bureaucracy. People won cases, yet the system did not become more willing to reform. Michael’s cumulative insight is what powers WeFix.Social: lasting structural change against economic vulnerability comes not from campaigning or litigation alone, but in the actual delivery of social security through the collective enforcement of existing rights—so that people can experience the welfare state as a support system that works for them.

With WeFix.Social, Michael is building a new “front door” to the welfare state, working with the current system with its limitations, and with people as they actually live. Instead of waiting for citizens to find the right office, printer, application forms and vocabulary, his platform combines the new potentials of technology with trusted intermediaries and everyday touchpoints—social workers, kindergartens, women’s shelters, temporary work agencies, and consumer finance apps. It thus removes hidden barriers that keep eligible people from applying: shame, fear of making mistakes, language hurdles, and the learned helplessness that comes from repeated failure. It also strengthens the delivery ecosystem, creating new roles for welfare navigators who can facilitate accurate applications and freeing counsellors and social workers from complex calculations and repetitive form-filling to focus on the relational dimension of support.

WeFix.Social then processes the applications collectively through a single interface that calculates and submits them to the state. This is crucial because Germany’s welfare landscape is fragmented across dozens of benefits and myriad local forms. WeFix uses the fact that correctly submitted applications are legally binding regardless of the form used to standardize the citizen-facing layer even when public IT remains decentralized. Routing thousands of cases through one interface generates mass visibility of fundamental issues such as bureaucratic delay and inconsistent application of rules.

At scale, the platform creates material pressure for institutional reform. Complete and correct applications reduce administrative workload—an estimated 80% lower processing time per case—making adoption and automation attractive. At the same time, higher take-up increases public spending by billions, confronting the state with its own legal obligations. Because the approach is grounded in existing law and built for adoptability, Michael’s vision of success will be to, first, establish a cooperative governance structure, handing power over to welfare users; and ultimately handing over the platform to the state when it is ready. In that way, Michael is building WeFix not only as a tool for higher benefit take-up, but as an instrument for repairing the relationship between citizens and the state—creating a welfare experience that works, and with it, a rebuilding of trust in institutions.

Germany has, in a formal sense, already decided to eliminate poverty, through a dense web of social security laws that guarantees support to an estimated 20 million eligible citizens. Yet the country still experiences a different, silent reality: poverty as a consequence of administration rather than policy. Around 13.4 million people remain poor, in part because the path to receiving legal support to which they are entitled is so complex and obscure that roughly half never access it. The result is measurable: an annual “poverty gap” of about €45 billion—the difference between what people should receive under the law and what actually arrives in their accounts—left unclaimed year after year.

The first obstacle is sheer structural complexity. Germany distributes more than 100 overlapping social benefits across three ministries, four federal levels, roughly 10,000 municipalities, and many overlapping eligibility categories. There is no single, citizen-facing place that shows an individual’s full entitlement picture. Applications commonly run to 20 pages, and claiming one benefit often conflicts with others. One office’s decision can create financial consequences for another—so “correct” claiming becomes a coordination problem that is impossible for a citizen to solve alone. A telling example of what this has meant is that the Kinderzuschlag (child supplement) reaches only about one-third of eligible families.

Each authority operates its own IT system, with little interoperability across municipal, state, and federal levels. Many applications that begin online must still be printed, signed, and posted; because of the high rate of incorrectly filed applications, a typical case triggers two to four rounds of document requests by mail. Benefit decisions take five to twelve months on average, with documented cases extending beyond a year, as staff shortages and manual processing compound delay. Accuracy is also unreliable—around 40% of official benefit decisions contain legal errors that go unchallenged because appeals demand time, knowledge, and stamina that people in crisis do not have. Acute needs go unmet.

Inevitably, the system generates its own psychological barriers. Repeated exhausting encounters with its opaque processes create learned helplessness. Stigma raises the threshold further, particularly for the “working poor” who do not self-identify as welfare recipients and avoid the spaces associated with welfare altogether. They are the most structurally invisible group, for whom the system is least designed to find: employed individuals and families who qualify for means-tested benefits but do not know. Since it is the citizen’s responsibility to discover eligibility, calculate entitlements, and initiate claims, this design exacerbates a hidden poverty which, when it affects children, accumulates consequences slowly over decades. People with migration backgrounds face an added language barrier. Many households lack the tools such as computers, printers, scanners, which administrative processes often assume, so the gap between how institutions communicate about documentation and people’s capacity to respond becomes another silent barrier.

The damage is not confined to households; it reverberates through the economy and the political system. The downstream costs of poverty are estimated at roughly 3.4% of GDP annually through lost employment, lower earnings, worse health outcomes, and reduced government revenue—far exceeding what prevention would cost. Non-take-up is highest among groups whose political participation is already structurally fragile—single parents, low-wage workers, and migrants—contributing to disengagement and declining trust in democratic institutions as income falls. The link is now quantifiable: each one-percentage-point increase in the poverty gap correlates with a 1.2-percentage-point increase in far-right party vote share, making welfare non-take-up not only a social policy failure but a measurable driver of democratic destabilization. At the same time, a recent study found that nearly half of Germans say their trust in the state would rise if digital services were simple and fast—an indictment of the current experience and a clue to what is at stake.

What makes this crisis particularly stubborn is that it is widely recognized but structurally hard to fix from within. Government-commissioned analyses—such as the NKR Gutachten (2024), the federal government’s own reform impulses (2024), and the Sozialstaatskommission (2026)—identify the same core failures: complexity, fragmentation, and the need for centralized digital solutions, simplification, and automation. Yet no single authority is responsible for a citizen’s total entitlement picture, so reform requires simultaneous coordination across federal, state, and municipal levels; digitization investments are often decided by the very municipalities locked into legacy systems; and fragmented data governance—including 17 separate data protection authorities—creates additional friction. The result is a cycle the state struggles to break: reports are written, roadmaps are published, pilots are funded, and still billions in legislated support go unclaimed each year—while administrative overload grows and the welfare state risks, gradually and quietly, failing the legitimacy test it was built to pass.

Michael’s strategy with WeFix.Social is built as a deliberate correction to two routes that he has already tested at national scale over a decade of trying to shift German social policy. His basic income work proved that public imagination can move quickly: millions signed up to a lottery-based system in order to receive a basic income, while millions more donated to prototype and test the viability of a nationwide basic income structure, all the while generating a high-profile political debate which influenced national policy. Still, even after generating the most comprehensive study on universal basic income of any developed nation so far, Michael saw its gains reversed as the political winds shifted, because awareness alone does not bind administrations to act. His sanctions work proved the opposite: legally binding individual wins can be achieved repeatedly, yet the state can absorb them one case at a time without changing the underlying machinery. WeFix.Social is designed as a third pathway: neither pushing a utopian vision of the state, nor fighting the state, but effecting change through the procedurally correct enforcement of rights that already exist in law. Built as civic infrastructure, WeFix.Social consolidates Germany's 100+ fragmented social entitlements into one guided application process, converts isolated welfare recipients into a coordinated collective actor, and makes institutional reform the path of least resistance. The strategy operates on four interlocking levels: reaching the unreached, removing barriers to completion, building an intermediary ecosystem, and generating collective pressure for systems change.

The platform's core design principle is to work inside the state as it exists today, not as reformers wish it were. WeFix.Social is free, multilingual, and mobile-native: it calculates eligibility across overlapping benefits in seconds and converts fragmented bureaucratic requirements into a guided, step-by-step path completable from a smartphone. Documents—bank statements, rental contracts, ID—can be captured and uploaded via WhatsApp, expanding access to hard-to-reach groups and helping them succeed at every step of the way. Completed applications are then routed through the channels authorities already accept—forms, letters, faxes, official electronic mailboxes—so results are independent of the pace of public-sector digitization.

Equally important, the platform is engineered to overcome the psychological barriers that cause non-take-up even when information exists. When Michael called users who had dropped off mid-process, he found they were not confused—they were paralyzed. WeFix's AI counsellor—trained in conversations with experienced social workers—guides users in real time, in their own language, with a tone calibrated to make the next step feel doable rather than threatening. The AI is not a replacement for care; it is a capacity multiplier that helps applicants to succeed precisely where mental blocks most often prevent them from completing the task.

Because non-take-up is concentrated among people least likely to seek help, the second strategic pillar is distribution. WeFix.Social therefore does not wait to be found: it is embedded in the institutions and digital environments already present in low-income households' lives. Confirmed distribution channels include FinanzGuru (a consumer finance app that pre-filters users by income), Fröbel (Germany's largest kindergarten operator), the national temporary employment association, and a growing network of social counseling organizations. The spread logic is intentionally self-reinforcing: a working single parent who assumed “I’m not entitled because I have a job” can learn within minutes that multiple supports apply, submit an application that is structurally correct, and then share a success story, becoming a credible messenger to peers in the same situation.

In parallel, Michael builds an intermediary ecosystem as the political and operational backbone of WeFix. He equips human intermediaries who are not professional social workers to become “benefits navigators,” combining trust and relationship with the platform’s computational power. Over time, Michael also plans a peer-to-peer layer in which successful beneficiaries can become guides for others in their community, creating a new role for people who experience self-efficacy and then share that experience with others. Alongside the citizen-facing reach, Michael has built sozialstaat.de as a dedicated platform for professional social workers and those in adjacent fields, replacing improvised Excel sheets with a unified entitlement calculation engine and shared case management tools. Keeping the core service free for frontline organizations is part of coalition-building: it creates a network of actors whose daily work becomes easier because the platform exists, and who therefore have a reason to defend it if it becomes controversial. Michael’s experience has made him wary of tech solutions that stand alone; his goal is an alliance of practice—an informal “union of welfare workers”—that makes the tool socially embedded rather than politically isolated, in organizations that want to serve their clients more efficiently.
Once volume builds, the strategy shifts from service delivery to collective processing. Routing thousands of claims through one interface creates aggregate visibility into systemic patterns that no single claimant or counselor can see: which offices routinely miss statutory deadlines, where decisions are structurally wrong, and where legal benefit reductions cluster. That data becomes the backbone of a “digital union” function. Michael’s stance is that confrontation is not a deviation from its purpose but evidence that it is enforcing what the state is already obligated to do.
To scale this pressure without charging the poorest users, WeFix.Social pairs a non-profit structure with financing mechanisms aligned to enforcement. Current funding combines private donations with early public innovation support, including approximately €200,000 from the Ministry of Research, as Michael tests different business models. Two revenue pathways are emerging that align incentives with enforcement and learning. Importantly, Michael brings proof that he can resource an idea at scale: at Mein Grundeinkommen, he built a crowdfunding engine that generated €1 million-per-month in passive income, demonstrating fundraising capability that extends beyond any single project.
Even at an early stage, WeFixs outputs are already building proof that the model can operate at meaningful scale. WeFix.Social currently processes €6.1 million in benefit claims annually, with roughly €31 claimed per €1 of organizational expenditure, and has built more than 40 active intermediary partnerships across child-care, finance, temporary employment, and counseling networks. Where applications are correctly assembled and routed, reported administrative processing time on the state side drops sharply—an estimated 80% reduction compared to standard submissions—suggesting that the platform’s pressure mechanism is coupled with a genuine reduction of avoidable administrative work. These numbers matter strategically because they turn a moral argument (“people should get what they are entitled to”) into an operational argument (“this is the cheapest way to make the system function”). WeFix has also received validation from state experts – Julius Sicken, a Deloitte advisor working for the National Regulatory Control Council, describes the platform as "the most effective approach currently available" for increasing benefit take-up, while Katja Kipping, a German politician and former Berlin Senator who served in the Bundestag from 2005 to 2021 and now serves as Managing Director of the Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband, one of Germany’s largest welfare organizations with 39,000 member organizations, endorsed WeFix as a viable solution, stating, “WeFix.Social can facilitate a large part of the necessary simplifications (to the welfare system). There was unanimous agreement (among our regional directors) that this would also significantly reduce the workload for social service agencies.”

The path forward is sequenced to convert operational proof into institutional inevitability. Phase one focuses on reaching critical mass in Germany by pushing user acquisition costs toward zero through partner distribution, automating review of applications, and enabling cost-free, legally valid submissions through official electronic mailboxes. Phase two is triggered once volume is large enough for robust measurement: a pilot study designed with the German Institute for Economic Research will quantify reductions in hidden poverty, improvements in processing time, and measure increase in institutional trust for users who successfully submit their applications, producing an evidence base that can unlock public procurement and adoption. Phase three begins when pressure becomes unignorable—through collective enforcement, media attention, and administrative costs—so reform becomes the path of least resistance: either the state modernizes and adopts the approach, creating a sort of Digital Public Infrastructure that allows solutions like Michael's to "plug in" to the system, or it must publicly defend denying citizens’ rights that are demonstrably deliverable. Because welfare complexity and non-take-up are not unique to Germany, Michael is already identifying near-term replication contexts such as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. And because the infrastructure he is building is a form of power, his long-term legal vision is explicit: first accumulate the scale and legitimacy needed to function, then decentralize ownership into a cooperative owned by citizens and communities themselves, supported by a supervisory structure that includes state and civil-society actors and people with lived poverty experience—so the “digital welfare union” ultimately belongs to the people it serves.

Born in 1984 in Rüdersdorf near Berlin, Michael Bohmeyer was five when German reunification arrived and his parents’ stable East German life dissolved overnight. The social texture changed with it—from evenings where neighbors gathered in the living room to a society that felt more hurried, individualized, and status-conscious. This experience left an indelible mark: "Systems we believe are stable can change very quickly.” His parents adapted and rebuilt successfully, but their hard work also meant absence, instilling in Michael a longing for a more equitable society with more leisure time and self-determination. Growing up in Brandenburg in the 1990s also had a dark side: as Michael was surrounded by the visible presence of neo-Nazi violence, the constant fear hardened his longing for a stable society that can resist fascist thinking and make it easier for people to rely on one another’s basic decency.

Michael’s entrepreneurial journey started at an early age. At sixteen, he spent a year in conservative West Michigan and encountered a different cultural reflex: people starting things without waiting for permission. Returning to Germany, he began building—by his count, around ten ventures across IT and commerce—driven by a do-it-yourself pragmatism, a willingness to try, fail fast, and restart. He is unusually self-aware about the pattern: starting comes naturally, and handing over is part of how he stays effective. When he later began receiving a €1,000 monthly profit distribution from his company—his “personal basic income”—he noticed something more important than income: unconditional security changed his stress level, his presence as a father, and his sense of inner quiet. It became a lived prompt to ask whether social policy could be designed around reducing fear rather than policing behavior. In 2014, he founded Mein Grundeinkommen (“My Basic Income”) to make that experience available to others at scale. Realizing that the path to universal basic income would be a long and arduous one (and would perhaps never become politically viable), he founded Sanktionsfrei two years later (while continuing to run Mein Grundeinkommen) to correct injustices in the welfare system, producing advocacy and research that directly influenced a 2019 Federal Court ruling that declared welfare sanctions partially unconstitutional. Both organizations continue to exist and work successfully in their spheres of influence.

What distinguishes Michael from most social entrepreneurs is not what he built, but what he did when his organizations were successful: he declared them insufficient. When 4 million users, €50 million redistributed, a bestselling book, a documentary, and ten years of regular television coverage did not produce the structural change he was seeking — and when the far right surged—he re-examined his assumptions. As Ashoka Fellow Max Oehl, who nominated Michael, put it: “He is one of the most entrepreneurially rigorous people I know, because he tested his theory of change — built something successful, looked at the evidence, saw it wasn't producing the desired results, and created something new.” That capacity to say “this worked, but it didn’t work in the way that matters” is the through-line across his journey—from idealism, to confrontation, to a more sober approach: strong institutions, human rights, and an effective welfare state. With the founding of WeFix.Social, Michael describes he has learned to be compassionate towards the state. His wish is for as many people as possible to have a positive state experience: rebuilding trust as the foundation to a stable society.