Ricardo Dávila, a 42-year-old municipal appeals clerk, scored 86 points to the government’s AI system’s 69 in the final of Turkey’s Public Judgment Challenge, announced in Ankara on Thursday. The competition drew 8,400 public employees from all 81 provinces, and its winner will direct a ₺4.8 million grant (about €126,000) to improve appeals services in Izmir.
Dávila, who has spent 14 years helping residents contest local decisions, said the prize mattered less than the final scenario. It asked whether a fictional applicant should receive winter heating aid after a database rejected her address, though she had a paper lease and utility receipts. The clerk recognised the details as echoing his mother’s case.
The file behind the final
In the contest, civil servants and the government’s language model assessed the same anonymised cases, with a panel of five judges scoring accuracy, fairness and clarity. The model had outperformed most contestants in earlier rounds, according to the Public Service Directorate, which ran the event.
Dávila’s answer called for a home visit and temporary approval while the applicant’s address was checked. “A database can show where a person sleeps; it cannot tell you whether the state has made it impossible to prove,” he said after the result was announced.
The turn came when he asked organisers to check the scenario’s source. It had been adapted from a 2019 appeal in which his mother’s heating-aid application was rejected because her address was missing from a municipal register. Dávila had helped her challenge the decision; a separate district office later approved the aid.
“The case was stripped of names and identifying details, and no contestant was told where it came from,” said Omolara Okonkwo, the panel’s chair. She said Dávila’s disclosure came after the judges had submitted their scores and that the panel reviewed the selection process before confirming the result.
A test for public services
A database can show where a person sleeps; it cannot tell you whether the state has made it impossible to prove.
Ricardo Dávila, municipal appeals clerk
The system had been trained on thousands of anonymised administrative decisions, including appeals from several cities, the directorate said. It could identify missing documents and apply eligibility rules, but its response in the final treated the absent registry entry as decisive. Judges gave Dávila extra credit for proposing a way to verify the applicant’s circumstances without delaying assistance.
Dominik Matić, the directorate’s programme chief, said the contest was designed to test the limits of automated decisions before a planned expansion to 30 municipal offices next year. The rollout will now pause for a review of how the system handles address disputes, he said. “No model should turn an incomplete record into a final answer,” Matić said.
Dávila’s grant will fund extra appeal appointments and a pilot home-visit team in Izmir, where staff handle about 26,000 benefit and permit challenges a year. He said his mother’s case was resolved only after she found the right paper receipt, and that many applicants would not know which document to bring.
The contest has made the quiet work of municipal clerks a national political argument: whether faster decisions are worth the risk of a wrong refusal. Dávila plans to return to his desk on Monday, where the first change will be a new rule requiring staff to check an address mismatch before closing a case.
