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PAN Lab levers

Lever

Check copied records

The organization checks every copied record against its source before anyone acts on the copy. A mistake written once in one system is caught before a second system treats it as fact. The check matters most where a copy triggers an action, such as a debt notice or a penalty.

What it is

Organizations copy records from system to system, and a downstream system often acts on its copy without asking where it came from. The documented failures cited below include programs that acted on copied determinations with no check against the source records, and one of them raised hundreds of thousands of wrongful debts. Reconciliation is the step those programs lacked. Before a copy triggers an action, the organization compares it with the original.

What it pushes on in the Lab

In the Lab, this lever strengthens the pathway by which copied records are reconciled against their source.

amplifiedReplicated records reconciled against their source

You can also pull this lever at a strong tier, which costs more. At the strong tier, each effect below the Lab's strongest setting pushes harder.

In the modes that offer aiming, you can aim this lever at particular parts and pathways of a network. Otherwise it applies to the whole network.

This lever pushes less hard when you switch on lingering effects in the Lab's options, unless you also pull Understand the system.

Its pattern in the Practice Library

The Practice Library describes the pattern behind this lever:Reconcile copied records

The pressures it answers

No pressure page lists this lever among the levers that answer it.

Where you can pull it

Networks in the Lab that offer this lever:99

Every network that offers it

The evidence behind its effects

The Lab cites these claims from the evidence registry for this lever's effects.

Documented benefit-automation failures replicated determinations into downstream systems with no independent reconciliation against the source records — Michigan MiDAS actioned replicated flags and Robodebt reversed the onus onto recipients.[4]

The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme documented hundreds of thousands of wrongful debts raised by an unlawful income-averaging method, with the onus placed on recipients to disprove automated assessments.[5]

royalcommissionintotherobode2023aGroundingGovernmentSave

Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme (2023) https://robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au/

https://robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au/

Appears in: PAN framework development

Grounds: deployment audit: Robodebt

Pull this lever in the PAN Lab and watch which way it pushes the network.

Open the PAN Lab