Handling Legislation Change

When a product is first implemented, typically there is an initial version of legislation which takes effect until further notice.

However, over time, for political, policy or budgetary reasons, the legislation underpinning the functional requirements for your product may change. One style of change prevalent amongst social security legislation is whereby the eligibility and entitlement rules for cases change over the lifetime of the case. Typically (but not always):

• the change in rules "takes effect" on a particular date; the case's eligibility and entitlement is calculated according the "old" rules before that date, and according to the "new" rules after that date;
• the date that the rules changes takes effect is the same for all cases for that product, i.e. there is no data on any case which affects the date from which the new rules apply;
• cases that came to a natural end before the change in legislation are unaffected;
• cases that start after the new rules have taken effect use the new rules only; and
• after the new rules have taken effect, any new claims which are registered to retrospectively start before that date will use a mixture of old and new rules, just as for claims which were registered on time before that date.

The Engine uses the term "legislation era" to refer to a period of constant legislation; in other words, a change in legislation (no matter how big or small) ushers in a new legislation era for a product.

The following example illustrates how a product set-up might need to change from supporting just the "old" rules, to supporting a mixture of "old" and "new" rules, to be applied to different legislative eras.

A client has been receiving an Income Assistance benefit but the case has subsequently ended. Another client has been receiving the same benefit and continues to do so. Both of these cases are using the eligibility and entitlement rules that were implemented to meet the requirements of the single (initial) version of the legislation.

New legislation is enacted resulting in the need for the social services agency to modify the eligibility and entitlement rules. Changes are made to the rule set and made effective from the date on which the legislation went into effect.

For the case that has already ended, eligibility and entitlement continues to be determined using the initial version of the rules because the case ended before the effective date of the legislation changes. For the case that remains open, eligibility and entitlement continues to be determined using the initial version of the rules up to the effective date of the legislation change, but uses the new version of the rules from the effective date onwards.

For any cases that are created after the date on which the new version of the rule set took effect, eligibility and entitlement will be determined using the new version of the rule set. For any cases that are retrospectively created and begin before the effective date of the legislation changes, eligibility and entitlement will be determined using the initial version of the rule set up to the effective date and the new version of the rule set from that date onwards.

The Engine supports two different mechanisms for implementing legislation change:

• Branching logic in your CER rule sets

  You can create a new version of your existing rule sets used by your product, and this new version of the rule set can contain branches which apply different logic to the periods on your cases, before and after the date that the legislation changes.

• Multiple product periods for your product

  You can change your product's set-up so that the lifetime of the product is carved up into distinct "product periods", and you can assign different eligibility/entitlement CER rule sets to each of the product periods.

Each of these approaches has its own benefits and limitations. The remainder of this chapter describes these two supported mechanisms in greater detail, followed by some important points to consider when choosing which approach to follow when implementing a particular change in legislations.