How Do Government Agencies Determine Eligibility and Compliance?

With increasing calls for government accountability and cost savings, agencies are contending with a mountain of rule and policy changes affecting everything from pensions and benefits, to client eligibility and oversight. To make sense of it all, administrators are turning to products like Progress® Corticon®, a business rules engine (BRE) that automates decision making with business logic that sits outside the code. Easy access to logic fosters increased agility as business users can apply rules changes quickly, ensuring error-free and accurate processes without draining IT resources.

Where Can Government Agencies Apply Business Rules?

There are a host of applications where effective business rules management can create value:

• Pension Management: Rule changes to pensions systems, such as retirement age, eligibility and more require careful scrutiny to ensure pensions are properly funded.
• Healthcare and medical insurance: State-run health exchanges require specific rules logic to ensure customer eligibility and benefit levels are maintained. This can be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve accurately when done manually.
• Financial Reporting: Changes to credit scores, bond ratings and budgets all affect the government’s ability to generate accurate financial documents.
• Security: Changes in employee security clearances granted only when certain conditions are met.
• Benefits Determination: Business rules help govern benefits for programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); Women, Infants and Children (WIC) or other food assistance–even housing, child care, disability, living and fuel assistance programs.

Why Should Government Agencies Automate Business Rules?

Rules and regulations are always changing. Computed manually, it can be fruitless to try and keep pace while still ensuring accuracy and full compliance. Government agencies, while not private businesses, do encounter severe consequences for non-compliance―and can even leave agencies exposed to legal action. As the legislative process can sometimes get bogged down, agencies are still required to provide proper benefits when laws change. Corticon has been shown to reduce maintenance cycles by 25x.

The benefits of automating business rules with a BRE like Corticon are significant:

• Public trust that agencies can effectively comply with laws and regulations
• Improved customer service
• Consistent application of benefits to constituents
• Quick and efficient response to rules, regulation and policy amendments
• Better accuracy from automating decisions
• Cost savings in labor, time and reduced errors