Highway to Government Pay
Highway to Government Pay
Claiming compensation from the government; housing benefit; social security benefit; veteran allowances and other payments used to be a painfully slow process until a revolutionary online service was introduced to cope with the complex legislative guidelines.
Delays in delivering entitlements to internal staff as well as external staff were often caused because too much information had to be processed before a claim could be completed.
The legislative complexities were usually dealt with by people who had to spend too much time sifting through the minor details of each claim. Claimants used to drop in or call the government office for advice on how to collect their entitlement, but they were slowed up by individuals struggling to decipher a minefield of information. Inevitably, errors were frequently made as well as inconsistent responses.
One government office would give a different answer to another government office, which confused everyone involved. The consequences in the past have meant that people were not given accurate benefits or entitlements. In addition, the time for each person to gain their entitlement often took too long.
The introduction of SoftLaw's Statute Expert has stripped away all of these complexities and made the system much easier to use for government workers and claimants alike. The technology speeds up the process so that enquirers receive accurate claims more quickly. The system has also reduced government training costs, because Statute Expert has collated all of the information and automatically deals with the enquiries now by itself.
Once the computer is trained, it obviously does not need to be retrained. All of the compliance issues are considered, so the burden has been taken away from individuals having to deal with it.
SoftLaw's Chief Executive, Tony Kinnear explains how they set up the system for the government departments.
"We sat down with the head of each department and asked them what their problems were with administering each area of legislation. We then created a project plan, outlining how we would achieve the outcomes they required, which included reducing costs; creating consistency; better services and lowering training needs. Once we started the project, we entered all of the information about the legislation, regulations and the process of receiving a claim to the point of payment into our Digit Expert Developer database.
"As soon as it was in there, one engineer spent each day analysing and sorting through three pages of legislation. It usually takes a month or two for the whole team to build the standalone online application.
"Once it is built, the customer logs on and is guided through each claim application and led to a logical conclusion as effortlessly as possible. Behind the scenes, rules are applied in the software which are compliant with legislation, so the claimant is led down a pathway which provides them with a solid, accurate answer to their enquiry, without the risk of any rules and regulations being broken by the Department.
"This is the same process a human being would follow, but without the risk of human error.
"Our project with the Department of Veteran's Affairs provides the best example of one of our successful set-ups. They have about 250,000 veterans on their books. These are people who have served during wars in Australia. Under government legislation, those veterans are entitled to different types of compensation payments, which are very complicated to work out. The amount of compensation depends on the extent of their injury or illness. It also takes a long time to deliver these entitlements.
So the Statute Expert had rules applied to the online system which quickened it enormously. Before we started the process, it took 150 days to process a claim, which is unacceptable for somebody with an injury. We reduced this to 60 days after our system was implemented. Results showed that we increased productivity by 90 percent in the department and reduced costs by $2 million a year. This system is unique in the world, and we are now looking to roll it out in the U.S. and U.K. too."
In other areas - people will no longer need to call Centrelink at the Department of Community Services to ask about whether they are entitled to family tax benefits; unemployment payments and pensions entitlements because they will be able to go online and fill out the relevant questionnaire. This will also reduce appeals and disputes because each claimant will be shown precisely what they deserve. In some cases, the system will even inform people that they can claim benefits which they were not aware of.
Further SoftLaw projects will be applied to the NSW Government. They have about 400,000 public servants who are all subject to specific employment legislation. At the moment, public servants have to phone the HR department to find out about entitlement for long service leave or retirement benefit. The new application will allow them to go online and ask questions about many areas related to their benefits. For example, they will be able to find out if they can claim retirement payments straight after leaving the public service, or a few years later.
In Queensland, SoftLaw is setting up a pilot system to help Queensland staff administer public housing benefits. People can now find out if they can claim housing benefits by logging on instead of going into the office. This is being rolled out throughout Queensland, and will be used in other states if it is successful.
The founders of the company came up with this idea in 1996, when lawyer Peter Johnson and computer programmer David Mead both worked for a social security agency in Canberra. They were concerned that social security legislation was too complex and people were not getting what they were entitled to. So they said they would do something to fix it by building this technology which took the human element out of the legislation in some areas.
They turned their vision into SoftLaw to help people deal with legislation and understand what their obligations were for people to get what they were entitled too.
It has proved to be a huge success for people working in the government and claimants, and now they aim to take this Australian born product to the world, to make government processes much easier to deal with around the globe.