Children between the ages of 18 and 25 maintain the right to childrens benefit if they could prove they were still attending school. In that case parents had to submit a proof (on paper) from the school or university each year to their child benefit organisation. As of 1 September 2007, the Flemish parents have been released of this burden provided their children are registered in schools within the Flemish community. The project has made it possible that from now on students older than 18 are registered with the child benefit funds fully automatically. Apart from the far-reaching simplification within the Flemish and federal authorities, 225,000 paper dossiers are also replaced by electronic ones, without any intervention being required anymore from the citizens.

This project is an example of E-government in top gear: the government completes the entire process fully automatically, and doing so relieves citizens from all the work.

The project has involved collaboration between public administrations from different competence fields (education and social security) and different competence leves (regional and federal), building a data chain from schools to (private) child benefit institutions.

No more paper

The Flemish Ministry for Education and Training has a strategy of abolishing all the paper commucation between the Ministry and all the schools. In October each school and higher education institution has to send a digital list of all enrolled pupils and students to the Department of Education. The financing of each school is based on this list.  Even when someone deregisters during the school or academic year, this is automatically entered in the database.

These data are reused through the MAGDA platform which forwards the information from Education and Training to the federal government (Crossroadbank for Social Security. The Crossroadsbank transmits the information to the National institute for child benefits. those who forward the required proof of the school to the appropriate child benefit fund. To this end one single XML data flow is set up between all the institutions.

Longest electronic chain

It involves 75,000 certificates for secondary education and 150,000 for higher education each year. In terms of technical data, it is one of the longest electronic chains in Belgium. It starts with the educational institutions and runs via the educational administration through the Flemish MAGDA platform for data exchange to the Federal KSZ, the Federal child benefit funds and the different payment offices.

Fine-tuning all these links to one another is not just a technical tour de force. We also had to steer the communication between the partners in the right direction and have each party commit to paying part of the costs. Moreover, we had to build in guarantees so as to avoid double payments or citizens not receiving any child benefit at all.

Policy Context

The payment of child benefit is regulated by law. Child benefit is granted to salaried workers, self-employed persons and civil servants but the criteria for granting the benefit and the amounts differ. Every child is entitled to child benefit till the age of 18, the legal age for compulsory schooling. Children who are inscribed in education between the ages of 18 and 25 maintain their right to this child benefit. It is for this group of children that the child benefit funds required a proof of inscription in a school or university.

This project is proudly introduced as a joint project of the Flemish E-government service CORVE, the Flemish Ministry of Education, the Crossroads Bank for Social Security and the National Institute for Child Benefits.

The Mission of CORVE, the “Co-ordination Cell Flemish E-government”, is to develop the back-office infrastructure of e-government. It is tasked with co-ordinating and providing incentives, while creating a generic infrastructure to facilitate co-operation between the administrative entities at the various government levels.

 To improve the service delivery to the socially insured people and the companies the Crossroads Bank for Social Security (CBSS) was created 16 years ago. The mission of the CBSS is to be the engine of e-government in the social sector, i.e.

• to stimulate and to support the actors in the Belgian social sector to deliver more effective and efficient services with a minimum of administrative formalities and costs for all the involved; based on a common and concerted vision, the actors in the Belgian social sector benefit from new ICT technologies to improve and re-organize radically their mutual relationships and processes;
• to promote information security and privacy protection by the actors in the Belgian social sector so that all the involved institutions and people can have justified confidence in the system;
• to deliver integrated statistical information to the politicians and the researchers in order to support social policy formulation.

In the European context it is important to note that non-Belgian students studying in Flemish schools and entitled to a Belgian child benefit are of course included in this project. The French speaking community is interested in building a similar service in the future.

Description of target users and groups

It concerns two separate groups. On one hand it concerns all parents with children over 18 and younger than 25 who are still studying, on the other hand it concerns independent students between 18 and 25 years old who are still eligible for child benefit.

The first group is probably the most diverse group. This group consists of one-parent or one-income families, double-income households, as well employed, self-employed as unemployed.

In the last academic year there were 50.654 students inscribed in primary or secondary education, and 174.187 in higher education (together 224.841).

More over, there are also students in other forms of adult education, some of which are also entitled to child benefits. The registration details of all these students are also transmitted to the child benefit funds who then select the persons legally entitled to a benefit. In 2008 around 400.000 attestations were transmitted from the department of education to the social security institutions.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

AVIA started at the beginning of 2005. In September 2007 over 200,000 dossiers were exchanged electronically. The realisation of this complex project which had to be built from the bottom up took a short time.The background: In October schools send digital lists of all enrolled pupils and students to the Department of Education.

The Department therefore knows perfectly who is still studying. Even when someone deregisters during the school or academic year, this is automatically entered in the database.The needed electronic chain involves 225.000 certificates each year. In terms of technical data, it is one of the longest electronic chains in Belgium.

It starts with the educational institutions and runs via the educational administration through the Flemish MAGDA platform for data exchange to the Federal KSZ, the Federal child benefit funds and the payment offices.Fine-tuning all these links to one another is not just a technical tour de force. We also had to steer the communication between the partners in the right direction and have each party commit to paying part of the costs. Moreover, we had to build in guarantees so as to avoid double payments or citizens not receiving any child benefit at all.

Technology solution

As said, the automatic attestation system is one of the longest electronic chains in Belgium, and various tools, software, services and databases are used. In short: if a child is subscribed in a secondary school or is a student in a high school or a university, the proof of his inscription is sent to the Department of Education. This was an already existing data transfer mechanism, based on HTTPS file uploads (for the secondary schools) or through webservice calls (SOAP-XML) using security certificates for protection of the privacy.

The last part of the chain is the transfer of the attestations between the Crossroads Bank for Social Security and the Child Benefit Funds RKW and RSVZ, which transmit the attestations to the different Child Benefit Payment Agencies. This system, consisting of the transfer of the XML-messages over secure FTP, was also based on an existing data transfer mechanism.
 
The main challenge of the project was to set up a connection between the Department of Education and the Crossroads Bank for Social Security and to make sure that the attestations of inscription are transmitted in a format suitable to the other partners, by reusing the existing systems and architecture.

The connection between the Department of Education and the Magda-platform was built upon the existing network that interconnects all the departments and ministries of the Flemish government. Transfer of the XML-messages is done by FTP from the Department of Education to the Magda-platform. On the Magda-platform the necessary data format transformation is carried out to make the attestation compatible with the format expected by the Crossroads Bank, by using the messaging services and transformation services provided by the platform. The Magda-platform is a Service Oriented Architecture – platform or SOA, based on Solaris as operating system with Oracle databases. The engine is written in Java. The attestations are then transmitted through a secure VPN-tunnel using webservice calls (SOAP-XML). This last connection is a type of communication with the CBSS in which CORVE had already some experience. Since CORVE is a trusted third party for the CBSS, it was much easier for the Department of Education to use CORVE’s Magda-platform and talk and negotiate with a single technological partner rather than have to talk with numerous new partners.

It was a crucial success factor for this project to re-use as much existing data transfer mechanisms and authentic data sources: the schools and universities were already connected to Department of Education and the CBSS had already a working connection with the Child Benefit Funds, which in turn were already connected to the Child Benefit Payment Agencies. This project is therefore a very good example of the re-use of existing data exchange mechanisms rather than to re-build a data exchange chain from scratch; this way the partners saved a lot of time and money.

In this project all partners used as much as possible open standards and existing open source technologies, such as Java, XML and the SOAP-protocol, and focused on the re-use of existing data exchange flows and processes.

Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

This project is an example of E-government in top gear: the government completes the entire process fully automatically, and as such relieves citizens from all the work. Children under 18 are of school age and as a result the government automatically pays child benefit to the parents. When their children turned 18, parents had to apply for child benefit themselves by means of a form they received from the school or university concerned.

Advantages for citizens:

The advantage for the individual citizen is abundantly clear: he or she is released from the annual duty of completing the application form (unless his or her son or daughter studies in Wallonia or abroad) and of making sure that it reaches its destination in time. Most Flemings probably don’t even notice any change, because the familiar automatic payment continues without interruption. A mere 10% will still receive a form from the educational administration in the near future. The schools have been relieved of some of their secretarial duties. No more pupils and students who come asking for a form or a stamp.

Advantages for the administration:

Large impact on all bodies involved (federal and regional):

• Schools;
• Department of Education;
• child benefit funds;
• child benefit payment offices;

In theory only the Ministry for Education and Training will have a bigger workload. In fact, in the past we had nothing to do with this whole arrangement.  However, it is part of the service we provide to the educational community and the citizens. Especially the child benefit funds will have less work. This prospect motivated them to invest in this process. Just think of the time and energy you save when you no longer have to process 220,000 forms manually!

The advantage for the government lies in the fact that the process greatly reduces the number of errors. This should, among other things, result in fewer erroneous payments and consequently fewer reclamations.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Larger than €10,000,000

Track record of sharing

It is a beautiful example of the principle that the government should not ask what it already knows. This principle is also the basis of the Flemish E-government decree of 2008. But it does require a solid framework for data exchange between public institutions. As one of the first projects built on the MAGDA data exchange platform, this project built a lot of expertise within CORVE for future reference.

We do think it would be good for all European citizens if there were – within the boundaries of the privacy regulation- more possibilities to exchange cross-border information about citizens. Most of our e-government projects are based on the Belgian information (schooling, social security, …) which unfortunately means that citizens from other member states still have to provide all the necessary documents themselves (and mostly on paper).

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - The most important tip is to work together with specialised partners in the field of data exchange. Because of this support, pitfalls are avoided.

Lesson 2 - Spend sufficient time on a thorough analysis of your project. This is even more important in a project which is co-financed by different partners: in case of unexpected setbacks, there is always the risk of a partner withdrawing from the project.

Lesson 3 - Spend a lot of time on communication. The partners must be made well aware from the very beginning where you are heading and that their investment will make a profit. In addition they must really trust one another. It is essential to involve senior officials from each of the institutions concerned. Coordination between the commissioning bodies and the technical partners must be optimal as well. Another very important aspect is the communication between the different implementing bodies within the Flemish government, the federal government and the child benefit funds.

 

Scope: National, Regional (sub-national)