Providing better incentives for, and increasing the accountability of, local decision-makers has been central to many attempts to improve the targeting of social policies. In contrast, local state-capacity, which we identify as another likely key constraint, has received much less attention. Addressing this aspect, we evaluate a carefully designed state-capacity-building intervention, including a training and a data-provision component, for the national Old Age Allowance program in Bangladesh. The results of our RCT show that the intervention does not improve the targeting performance despite a positive impact on the knowledge of eligibility criteria among both the local-government representatives and the target group. Our evidence further suggests that prevailing corrupt practices might be the reason, and that low state-capacity is not the only obstacle that needs to be overcome to achieve a better targeting performance.