This report examines the phenomenon of "churn" in public benefit programs, where eligible participants temporarily lose benefits due to administrative processes, analyzing its impact on both recipients and state agencies, and suggesting strategies to reduce its occurrence.
At Rules as Code Demo Day we heard from Song Hia of the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and Ethan Lo of the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation who demoed the NYC Benefits Platform Screening API which provides machine-readable calculations and criteria for benefits screening that power the ACCESS NYC screening questionnaire. This makes it easier for NYC residents to discover multiple benefits they may be eligible for. The City is now extending the API to support the new MyCity platform, a one-stop shop for all services and benefits.
Code for America's GetCTC portal simplifies access to the Child Tax Credit for low-income families by providing a mobile-friendly, bilingual platform for streamlined tax filing.
The IRS is arguably the single most critical benefits administrator in the country, given its responsibility for tax credit-based relief programs, and COVID-19 relief payments. Despite these programs’ incredible progress in reducing poverty, and despite great strides by the IRS to implement them successfully, accessing IRS benefits remains too difficult for many low-income families. This report presents a comprehensive agenda to increase benefit coverage rates, simplify Americans’ interactions with the IRS, and decrease the portion of IRS benefits diverted to third parties.
This guide provides practical insights for benefits administrators on redesigning benefits systems using human-centered design to ensure all eligible residents can access crucial social safety net resources.
This interactive dashboard allows users to explore Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation and household characteristics by U.S. congressional district using American Community Survey data.
Describes the Principles of a Human-Centered Safety Net: Many Welcoming Doors, Easy to Understand, Clients Can Make Informed Decisions, Responsive to Changing Needs, Simple Actions
This resource outlines strategies for cross-enrollment outreach, which can break down silos between programs and reach applicants who may be eligible for under-enrolled benefits programs.
There are frameworks available that could inform the standardization of communicating rules as code for U.S. public benefits programs. The Airtable communicates the differences between the frameworks and tools. Each entry is tagged with different categories that identify the type of framework or tool it is.
