TABC automates rulemaking processes with Esper

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) regulates all phases of the alcoholic beverage industry in Texas, including sales, taxation, importation, manufacturing, transporting and advertising. The agency’s Alcoholic Beverage Code is made up of the guiding laws for the alcoholic beverage industry and passed by the Texas State Legislature.

After a Texas Sunset Commission report, TABC was looking to update their rulemaking practices and regulations. To accomplish this, they needed a way to consolidate and proactively review and repeal outdated, burdensome rulemakings. With COVID ushering a number of new regulatory requirements, TABC was also looking to stay organized and proactive amid policy changes.

TABC partners with Esper to innovate on rulemaking processes

This led to a partnership with Esper, a leading provider of policy management software. TABC is using Esper to digitize and automate their standard rulemaking and emergency rulemaking workflows and approvals—in addition to providing collaborative policy drafting tools, project management tools and robust federal and state regulation search capabilities.

Esper was able to automate three different workflows for TABC—a Proposal Phase rulemaking workflow, an Adoption Phase rulemaking workflow and an Emergency rulemaking workflow. Each of these have a series of stages, with steps that must be completed in order to advance the project. TABC is also to able to visualize the entirety of the project and check the status of each rulemaking package and ensure the project is hitting key deadlines.

Collaborative policy drafting tools

TABC will be drafting, reviewing and approving all of their rulemaking documents with Esper’s cloud-based policy drafting tools. Esper has created configurable templates for all of TABC’s policy documents—from Proposed Rules Preambles all the way through to their OOG Memo. These templates are automatically populated based off which rulemaking workflow TABC staff chooses.

Users can easily tag each other for review or approval, keep track of all document edits and export the final files in the desired format. This streamlined approach for policy drafting replaces what was a historical manual process for the agency.