For both Housing Benefit and Council Tax Support residents are required to report any changes in income to the council in a timely manner. This enables the authorities to update claims accordingly and to avoid any over-payments of benefits. A common way for residents to action this is to verify earnings is the provision of pay slips to the council.
The Challenge:
Updating earnings has always been one of the biggest tasks that a council has to undertake and are a big drain on time and resources. Typically, they needed to be processed by an officer due to the unstructured nature of the documents provided, i.e. scans or photographs of pay slips which couldn’t be read by automations. Furthermore, since the introduction of VEP, customers started to provide an increased number of payslips to avoid large overpayments, increasing paper work and formatting difficulties for council workers.
The Solution:
Ernie
Luton Council approached DigiStaff with a view to using a suite of intelligent automation solutions to create a team of digital workers to process earned income changes from the payslips provided. These accounted for typically 50% of the changes in circumstances that the council received.
Using the array of technologies that make up our DigiStaff packages, we were able to design, build, test and move into a production a set of DigiStaff who can read the unstructured data from the payslips provided (to date from over 200 different types of payslips), convert to a uniformed format and then process the changes into the Revenues & Benefits system.
In addition to payslips our DigiStaff packages can also read the details from other documents provided such as bank statements, passports, driving licenses and benefit award letters.
To date we are processing over 60% of the payslips directly and the remainder (where document is unreadable due to damage/poor quality), we generate a VEP alert enabling us to process the remainder of the changes.
This is saving the council 2.5 FTE every week who can be deployed into other tasks. Systems available on: Capita, Civica and Northgate
