RPA for financial administration

Municipality of The Hague

Rule-based algorithms are used to support the performance of debtor and creditor management.

Last change on 30th of April 2024, at 10:09 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Other algorithms
• Impact assessment: DPIA
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Public finance

Begin date

2023

Contact information

[e-mail]

Responsible use

Goal and impact

The aim is to automate repetitive and time-consuming employee processes to (continue to) cope with the growing workload.

The algorithm's function is to support administrators. The employee of the Municipality of The Hague is supported in administrative and repetitive tasks. As a result, the employee has more time for substantive tasks, the employee experiences less workload and the employee experiences more job satisfaction. A citizen/business will always deal with the algorithm only indirectly. The algorithm contributes to citizens/companies receiving faster feedback on payments. Citizen/business data are processed in fully encrypted form, ensuring data security.

Considerations

Providing timely feedback to citizens/businesses requires employee support. RPA technology is ideal for this, and the level of privacy, security and information management remains the same. An alternative to relieving staff using these algorithms would be to hire external staff. However, this is very expensive.

Human intervention

The algorithm is currently deployed to support staff in the transaction processing department (accounts payable/debtor management and the procurement and ordering service desk). It currently involves the processes "Handling reminders and dunning letters", "Final closure of purchase order on line request", "Modify dunning phase" and "Modify litigation".

The actions performed by the algorithm have an informing role in the process. When information is incomplete or not as expected, the algorithm is taken out of production and modified.

Risk management

There are no additional risks compared to manual processing. The data is processed encrypted by the software and not stored.

Legal basis

The entire financial administration within the Municipality of The Hague is based on the Budget and Accountability Decree.

Elaboration on impact assessments

During the tender process, a DPIA was carried out on the deployment of RPA, for which a number of additional measures were realised/determined. In addition, a pre-DPIA is always carried out on the process to be robotised before robotisation, so that the process owner understands the need for a DPIA.

A number of minor risks were identified during the DPIA that were immediately mitigated through additional documentation. One example is the feedback provided by the algorithm. This already included the automatic drafting of the message and who the reader can contact in case of questions, but this has now also been explicitly laid down as a requirement in the documentation around the process to ensure that this will also happen in subsequent processes.

Impact assessment

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)

Operations

Data

Multiple algorithms are subsumed under this initiative. An example is shown below. Two algorithms are used. The first collects the data from the correspondence with citizens/companies, encrypts it and creates a workbox for algorithm two. The second algorithm takes reports from the workbox and processes them. In the systems of the Municipality of The Hague (e.g. Oracle), it checks what the status is, then creates a record in the system that the status has been requested and provides feedback to an employee on the status of the notification. So the algorithms take care of, among other things: logging in, downloading, collecting and providing feedback. These are always (and only) the rules and steps determined together with the process experts. The algorithm has no self-learning element and the (approved) script changes only on request of the process owner.

The algorithm uses e.g. data from Oracle associated with (e.g.) the sent reminder or reminder. In it, only the data needed to provide feedback on the status is used. All data is used encrypted.

Technical design

The method is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). In it, repetitive, rule-based operations are performed by algorithms.