The P23R principle - Reducing bureaucracy costs through rule-based business-to-government communication processes

Companies continuously need to transmit corporate or personnel data to public authorities. In Germany, for example, national legislation currently stipulates over 10,000 reporting duties, resulting in annual bureaucracy costs for approximately 50 billion Euros. Often, similar or identical data have to submitted for different purposes to different government agencies. As of today, these reportings are often paper-based processes which belong to different workflows and are spread over different organizational units. Besides, the legal framework changes regularly, which results in high expenses for adapting the new reporting rules. In order to deal with these challenges, our paper focuses on the following research questions: How can reporting duties requiring the transmission of similar or identical data be systematically identified? How can fulfilling reporting duties be made more efficient using a rule-based approach? The paper describes how these questions are addressed by the P23R principle, a holistic approach for engineering efficient process chains between business and government. Concerning the first question, the P23R principle offers methods to analyse reporting duties on a meta level and with the help of domain models. As far as the second question is concerned, the P23R principle assumes that laws are mapped onto a formal, executable representation, which provides all information needed by P23R systems to compute and compose legally correct reportings. In this paper, we will describe the process of meta-analysis and the building of domain models. Both methods will be illustrated with an example from the domain of environmental reporting. We will also give an overview of the P23R framework and security architecture, which adheres to the paradigm of rule-based systems. In order to prove the validity of the P23R principle, its methodological and technical concepts were successfully implemented and piloted in the domain of reporting duties for employers and environment. The findings resulting from piloting the P23R principle will be described.