About

What this is, and what it isn't.

Short version: these tools check a letter against the rule it says it rests on, and show you their work. They are not a lawyer and they cannot tell you whether you will win.

What it does

You paste a letter. The tool pulls out the dates and claims it can actually find in the text, works out which deadlines those trigger, and checks the letter against the list of things the law requires such a letter to contain. Anything it reports comes with the citation behind it, so you can check the tool rather than trust it.

Which version of the rules

A letter is judged against the law in force on the day it was written, not the law today. If a rule changed last month, a letter from before the change still had to follow the older version — a later rule does not retroactively fix a defective notice, and it does not retroactively break a good one.

So every rule in this system records when it started and when it stopped applying, and every answer tells you which date it was checked against. If a letter has no readable date, the tool says so and declines to check it, rather than quietly using this month's rules on last year's letter.

What it will not do

  • Tell you that you will win. It cannot know that, and any tool that says otherwise is guessing.
  • Make up a fact that isn't in your letter. Anything it can't find a supporting quote for gets dropped rather than reported.
  • Store what you paste. Nothing you enter is written down or kept after the page closes.
  • Replace legal aid. If you can reach a legal aid office, do that — this is for the enormous number of people who can't.

How finished is it

First draft. The rules corpus was assembled from the regulations and agency guidance and has not yet been reviewed by a benefits attorney. Some entries are marked for verification in the source data because the underlying rule is itself an interim one that may still change. Every finding shows its citation and its confidence for exactly this reason.

Treat a result as a well-organized set of questions to bring to someone qualified — not as an answer.

Where it comes from

Built by BallotBase, which maps money and legislation for people who work on policy. These tools sit on the same legislative data — the bill text, the versions, the officials — pointed at the person a law happens to, rather than at the people writing it.

Nothing on this site is for sale and there is nothing to sign up for.