Cleaning up administrative codes

Government administrative codes are composed of regulations that specify how businesses and organizations can legally operate. These codes cover everything from federal labor standards to local zoning ordinances.

Despite the substantially large role administrative codes play in our communities, there is little infrastructure in place to support the drafting and management of these policies. At present, most governments’ internal processes rely on manual drafting that can carry unintended consequences like liability, legal enforcement, and ambiguity for governments and the public.

Going Digital

While the shift from paper to digital is an industry standard in most private sector professions, governments are just beginning to adopt digital best practices. A 2015 AIIM survey indicates that 46% of surveyed businesses said that the “removal of paper has been the biggest single productivity improvement for most of their business processes,” (Invensis). However, a digital shift doesn’t address the administrative debt associated with possible errors throughout the code.

By applying natural language processing techniques, Esper identifies and flags errors and inconsistencies in public policy. Some of the most common data points we detect include:

• Legalese: Many governments have rules for allowed and unallowed words, phrases, and grammatical types in policy text. These rules were created to ensure that policies don’t have any overly complex or incomprehensible language. For example, Connecticut’s Manual for Drafting Regulations includes a table for Plain English suggestions (see below). Esper automatically detects this “legalese” and suggests fixes.
• Repealed references: Governments must regularly review regulations to ensure that they don’t contain references to laws or rules that have been repealed. The consequences for a repealed reference could create a liability for the governing agency and result in legal action. Esper automatically surfaces repealed references with a red flag and links to the repealed rule.
• Rule review: Many states with sunset review processes or general rule review processes struggle to determine which rules are approaching expiration deadlines. Esper’s platform sources important dates for rules like its creation date, last updated date, expiration date (when applicable), and the last time that the rule was reviewed.
• Comprehension statistics: Governments often want to assess whether rules are easy to read, how restrictive they are, and how long they are among other factors. Esper’s rulemaking tools analyze rules and drafts to provide authors with that information for better policymaking.

Relatively simple and minute aspects of rules have wide-ranging consequences for how rules are implemented and enforced at scale. At present, governments don’t have access to tools to assess their error rates and where errors persist in their code. Esper’s platform promises to slash error rates, increase productivity, and free up government resources to better serve the public.