IRS – Commercial Intelligence

Does your business have logic that is more or less complicated than filing your taxes?

Most business logic is at least as complicated. But most business rule metaphors are not up to expressing tax regulations in a simple manner. Nonetheless, the tax regulations are full of great training material for learning how to analyze and capture business rules.

For example, consider the earned income credit (EIC) for federal income tax purposes in the United States. This tutorial uses the guide for 2003, which is available here. There is also a cheat sheet that attempts to simplify the matter, available here. (Or click on the pictures.)

What you will see here is typical of what business analysts do to clarify business requirements, policies, and logic. Nothing here is specific to rule-based programming. Continue reading “Harvesting business rules from the IRS”

For those who are interested in my former company, they are still committed to natural language business rules management technology, as shown in their most recent press release. They have also picked up on the public sector activity, especially eligibility, as discussed here.

From the release, CEO, Dominic O’Hanlon, said:

“With our natural language rule authoring capabilities and BRMS solutions, we are uniquely positioned to make our customers more competitive and agile in a fast-paced, highly-regulated world.”
“For the government market, Haley is a worldwide leader in using natural language technology to rapidly transform regulations, policies and rules into automated decision-making systems, to determine eligibility for government services, and in the taxation and immigration arenas.”

As discussed here, this focuses comes from Continue reading “RuleBurst re-brands as Haley Limited”