Topic: Research
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Shared Values/Conflicting Logics: Working Around E-Government Systems
This paper describes results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice.
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Exposing Error in Poverty Management Technology: A Method for Auditing Government Benefits Screening Tools
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
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Digital Distortions and Interpretive Choices: A Cartographic Perspective on Encoding Regulation
This article analyses ‘digital distortions’ in Rules as Code, which refer to disconnects between regulation and code that arise from interpretive choices in the encoding process.
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Helping People with Low Incomes Navigate Benefit Cliffs: Lessons Learned Deploying a Marginal Tax Rate Calculator
This report details findings and lessons from a project to develop a calculator to help people anticipate how a change in earnings from employment would affect their net income and information on their estimated effective marginal tax rate.
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Exploring Rules Communication: Moving Beyond Static Documents to Standardized Code for U.S. Public Benefits Programs
This brief analyzes the current state of federal and state government communication around benefits eligibility rules and policy and how these documents are being tracked and adapted into code by external organizations. This work includes comparisons between coded examples of policy and potential options for standardizing code based on established and emerging data standards, tools, and frameworks.
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Benefits Cliffs Coaching with the Atlanta Fed’s CLIFF Tools: Implementation Evaluation of the National Pilot
The Atlanta Fed’s CLIFF tools provide greater transparency to workers about potential public assistance losses when their earnings increase. We find three broad themes in organization-level implementation of the CLIFF tools: identifying the tar- get population of users; integrating the tool into existing operations; and integrating the tool into coaching sessions.
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Exploring a new way to make eligibility rules easier to implement
Programs like Medicaid and SNAP are managed at the federal level, administered at the state level, and often executed at the local level. Because there are so many in-betweens, there is significant duplicated effort, demonstrating the need to simplify eligibility rules to facilitate easier implementation.
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AI-Powered Rules as Code: Experiments with Public Benefits Policy: Summary + Key Takeaways
This is the summary version of a report that documents four experiments exploring if AI can be used to expedite the translation of SNAP and Medicaid policies into software code for implementation in public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems under a Rules as Code approach.
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Digital Identity Community of Practice 2025 Q3 Meeting: Beneficiary Feedback on Identity Proofing
On July 16, members of the Digital Identity Community of practice gathered to learn how peers are gathering beneficiary feedback on their experiences with accounts and proving their identity.
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Rules as code: Seven levels of digitisation
This report, written for practitioners, classifies “digital transformation” of legal rules into a hierarchy of levels to help establish common terms.
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AI-Driven Statutory Reasoning via Software Engineering Methods
This article explores how legal documents can be treated like software programs, using methods like software testing and mutation analysis to enhance AI-driven statutory analysis, aiding legal decision-making and error detection.
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AI-Powered Rules as Code: Experiments with Public Benefits Policy
This report documents four experiments exploring if AI can be used to expedite the translation of SNAP and Medicaid policies into software code for implementation in public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems under a Rules as Code approach.