Anyone who has ever needed to understand what government benefits them or someone they cared for was entitled to know the web of perplexing rules and regulations involved with lodging a claim.

Legislation and government rules for benefits and entitlements is a complex and constantly changing landscape. Understanding government entitlements and what payments you're entitled to is even more complicated when taking into account individual circumstances, life events, changes over time, and other benefits that could impact entitlements. Or more recently, for example, even knowing if you’re up to date with the right number of COVID vaccinations has been difficult.

Drum roll please… introducing Rules as Code (RaC) and the OpenFisca engine, coupled with a Drupal site. Your worries are over – or at least significantly reduced. RaC is able to digest complicated legislation such as entitlements available to citizens and all the related rules and unique conditions that may apply, which is converted into code. Citizens simply answer a series of simple questions on a website to instantly get the correct answer without ever having to read through pages and pages on related government websites.

Learn how Salsa has been experimenting with a proof of concept using RaC for the Australian Government and then implementing RaC into a real Drupal website directly benefiting New Zealand citizens.

This presentation will provide a quick overview of both projects, before moving into the technical solution that was implemented for each. We built an OpenFisca Drupal module to integrate OpenFisca with a Drupal webform. This was built for a GovCMS (an Australian, whole-of-government Drupal CMS program) proof of concept that focused on some of the rules around COVID-19 vaccination. Users were taken through a series of questions to find out if they were up-to-date with their COVID vaccinations and if they needed to be vaccinated to work in their industry in their state. The GovCMS proof of concept was completed in September 2022. While for the New Zealand BenefitMe.nz site, a simple webform allows users to enter information that’s sent to OpenFisca. The webform includes conditional logic so the question and answer path adapts to each person completing the questions. This was powered by a new custom block that was built to display the eligibility results and calculation logic (how much someone was eligible for) after the form is submitted. The alpha version of benefitme.nz was launched in mid-December 2022.

Our presentation will cover the following:

- A brief introduction to what is Rules as Code
- A quick overview of the process of turning legislation into RaC
- A more detailed look at how Drupal has been used in both example projects and the related Drupal module
- Creating the frontend experience for both the GovCMS PoC and BenefitMe websites

Session (45 minutes)

Experience level of the audience

Intermediate