The application process is initiated when the citizen selects Find Government and Community Help from the UA home page and chooses Apply For Benefits. The agency can configure the system to specify whether, before making an application for benefits, the citizen must be authenticated or not. If authentication is enabled, the citizen must be authenticated before proceeding with application intake. If it is disabled, the citizen may proceed with intake without authentication. If the citizen must be authenticated, the citizen must either create a new user account or log into an existing account before commencing the intake process.
At this point in the process, the citizen has a maximum of three (depending on the authentication configuration) choices that can be made:
Choosing to create a new account will bring the citizen to an account creation screen (for more information please refer to the Chapter 6 Security). Upon successful creation of the account, the citizen is automatically logged in to the system and the intake process proceeds.
If the citizen elects to log in, upon successful log in, the system will check if the citizen has any existing applications either in progress (i.e. not yet submitted to the agency) or awaiting disposition (i.e. Submitted to the agency but the agency has not yet processed the application). The lists are only displayed if there are items in the list, i.e. If there are no saved applications, the section containing saved applications is not displayed.
If applications are listed, the citizen is presented with several options depending on the state of a particular application. The citizen may choose to resume or delete an incomplete application, withdraw an application that has been submitted or start a new application. For the purposes of this chapter let us assume that the citizen chooses to start a new application.