| Special Workshop Title: | Electronic Government and Philosophy of Law |
| Author: | Prof. dr. Tom M. van Engers, Belastingdienst/Centrum voor Proces en Productontwikkeling |
| Paper Title: | Improving Legal Quality |
| Abstract: | Drafting and implementing
new legislation is a rather time, energy and money consuming process.
The many inter-connected processes and the large number of people
involved make it very vulnerable to errors. Varying interests have to be
aligned and communication difficulties due to differences in technical
jargon have to be overcome in both drafting and implementing changes to
legislation or even completely new legislation. The knowledge and
experience needed to create new laws, specify, design and implement
procedures and systems in legislative domains is very scarce. However,
getting the right knowledge at the right place at the right time is a
critical success factor for the ability to effectuate the legislative
power to regulate and control.
The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) has set up the POWER research program (Program for an Ontology-based Working Environment for Rules and regulations) aimed at the developed of a method and supporting tools for the whole chain of processes from legislation drafting to executing the law by government employees and supporting citizens. Parts of this program, the E-POWER project, is subsidized by the European Commission through the IST 5th framework program. The law-enforcement organization not only has to adapt its procedures, processes and information systems because a new law has to be implemented. Also risk diagnosis, assessment procedures and audit measurements have to be designed and implemented as well. Needless to say that next to this, political and social-environmental requirements have to be taken into account. One of these requirements is the need for diminishing the administrative costs of business. Between drafting new legislation and enforcement of this legislation a chain of processes has to be managed and aligned. Preventing errors as early as possible in this chain can save a lot of time and money. Not only at the design stage but even more during the law-enforcement stage. Unintended use or even worse abuse is often due to anomalies in the law. Also, the position of the government is much stronger when involved in a dispute if the law is very clear with respect to the object of disagreement. Improving legal quality is one of the three main goals of the POWER research program. The other two goals are reduction of total cost of ownership (TTO) of the (knowledge-based) systems intended for the support of civil servants or of citizens and secondly, reduction of time to market (TTM) i.e. the speed with which these (knowledge-based) systems can be created. The POWER-approach supports the finding of anomalies in legal sources. The presentation will show how the different knowledge representation formats are used in the POWER-approach and how they contribute to improving legal quality. |
This page was last updated on: 2003-05-04.