Assessment and Determination (ASD) 111-26010000

Assessment

Assessment is the process of calculating, from changes to a customer's circumstances, any consequential changes in the customer's Benefit Entitlements. Assessment can be performed either in online mode on the request of a Service Officer or on request of a trigger-driven batch program. When the changes have been calculated, the full results of the assessment are displayed to the Service Officer on a number of ASD screens.

Determination

Determination is the process of confirming that the assessment is correct via the Assessment Results (AR) screen.

Every system recalculates entitlement on the day that something happens, rather than at the end of the payment period in which things happen. This daily entitlement needs to be rolled up into the entitlement for a pay period.

The entitlement accumulator calculates the contribution made by each period of entitlement to a pay period and applies rounding rules to come up with the payment entitlement for a period.

To check that the accumulator processing is occurring correctly, Daily file is used.

The Adjustment Handler is activity based. It compares entitlements before and after the current activity’s changes are applied, and any differences are included in the results of the assessment shown on the Assessment Results (AR) screen.

Note: in general, adjustments are calculated for periods where the customer has already been paid.

The Trigger Assessment Checker (TAC) is a product that can be used to manage unexpected results from trigger processing. It has 3 components:

• Adjustment checking specifically, trapping triggers that generate overpayments or underpayments greater than specified limits.
• Status checking traps triggers that unexpectedly change a customer's benefit status.
• Rate variation checking traps triggers that unexpectedly change a customer's ongoing fortnightly rate by more than a specified amount (but may not necessarily result in adjustments or status changes).

Assessment Entitlement Period Alignment (ASEPALN) is a continual process for updating the ASEP group in the DETM file. It was designed to ensure payday codes are correctly allocated to customer records.

ASEPALN aligns the ASEP groups in the Determination file for a customer record, whenever an event occurs which changes the payday code for that customer. The ASEP group is the Assessment Entitlement Period group, which holds details of the Entitlement Period End Date Code for each payment system for which the customer has, or has had, an entitlement.

The ASEPALN program was introduced as part of the 1999 Pay cycles conversion.

The Change Point Driver is the engine behind the assessment process. Its purpose is to process calculation point dates and calculate a rate and status for each date. When the user enters 'AR' in the Next: field, the assessment process begins. The TAG process will tag to certain systems based on the entitlement tasks on the activity.

Summarisation is the process of copying all the circumstance data required to perform a benefit assessment to one central location in the M204 database, from where it can be loaded into rate calculators.

NOHL is a Date of Effect setting algorithm based on an examination of Date of Event (DOV), Date of Receipt (DOR), Date of Action (DOA), a standard 14 day notification period and whether an assessment is favourable or unfavourable. Each application area also has the capacity to input exceptions to NOHL where required (that is, specifying the actual DOE to use, or varying the 14 day notification period etc.).

For unfavourable decisions (decisions where the customer's rate decreases), the general principle is that, if the customer notifies the change within the allowable notification period, they do not need to repay money already received.

The FAO system has its own version of NOHL. Whenever rules 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 86 appear, this indicates that it is a FAO/NOHL assessment. Any queries regarding this are to be referred to the FAO applications area.

There are a number of screens that are involved in the ASD process. In the majority of cases these screens are available from either the Assessment Results (AR) or Daily Rates Summary (RATS) screen, and are predominantly display only screens. In addition, there are some screens that are available pre-AR.