AIOGovernment Check what you may be owed

The decision logic, in the open

How we decide

Screening someone out is a product output, not a risk to be avoided. But it is the output that can do real harm, so the rules below are enforced in code rather than trusted to good intentions.

The asymmetry that shapes everything

A wrong yes

One wasted application. Recoverable.

A wrong no

Money a household was owed, never claimed, and never discovered, because people who are told no stop looking.

These two errors are not equally bad, so they do not get the same bar. Everything below follows from that one sentence.

The three rules

  1. Rule out only on bright-line criteria

    A rule has to be written down, unambiguous, and read from an official source before it can exclude anybody. Judgement calls do not rule people out.

  2. Always show the rule and its date

    Every exclusion carries the rule that produced it and when we last read that rule. If we cannot name it, we cannot use it. The database itself refuses to store a ruled-out result that has no rule attached to it.

  3. Never render unknown as ruled out

    Unknown is a third answer, not a polite no. Where we hold no verified rule, we say we do not know and point at the authority.

What follows in practice

  • An unverified rule cannot exclude anyone. If a rule has no verification date, it is not allowed to produce "ruled out". It downgrades the answer to "possible" instead.
  • Missing information is never a failure. No income figure is not a high income. A status nobody mentioned is not a status the household lacks. Only something explicitly denied counts as a bright line.
  • Ruled out is shown, never hidden. It ranks last, and it stays on the page. Knowing what to skip gives a caregiver back an afternoon.
  • Results are append only. A re-run writes a new record stamped with the version of the engine that produced it, so an answer given today stays interpretable next year against the rules that actually produced it.

What we are not

We are not an eligibility authority. We screen against published rules and show our working. The agency that runs a program is the only body that can determine whether a person qualifies for it, and none of them has delegated that to us.

We are also not a law firm, a medical provider, an insurer or a government agency, and we are not affiliated with any of them.