Two computer hosts running SUSE Linux and the Apache Tomcat Java application server make the Belgian government manage its social tariffs for heating. The project provides a registry of citizens that can claim discounts on their heating bills. A third Linux host is used for testing updates to the system.
In 2004, Belgium's Federal Ministry of Economy was asked by the parliament to create a central and automated registry for its heating subsidy. The goal was to replace the time-consuming paper-based request that could be made to either municipalities, energy suppliers, pension funds or federal public services, which required every year some 300,000 forms to submitted. For every claim two verifications were required, causing errors and delays.
It took all the involved public organisations, funds and companies three years to agree on the project scope. The pilots were concluded in 2009, and since 2010, the system automatically matches records from various sources and informs the energy suppliers which customers should have their heating bill reduced, says Frank De Greve, project manager at the ministry. "Our system reduces delays, minimises mistakes and decreases the amount of paper that is sent around."
De Greve presented on the system at a conference on Big Data, taking place in Terhulpen on 21 November.
Broken record
The solution built for the ministry makes many automated cross checks between data gathered from energy suppliers and public administrations. The system contains over 10 million records, with 7 million of those submitted by energy suppliers - using FTP, and updated once a year. "Just 8 of Belgium's 24 energy suppliers use the national registry number to record their customers. So in the majority of cases, we need to cross-check names, addresses and birth dates."
The data is first translated to Unicode (UTF-8), says De Greve, to allow diacritic marks and all other special characters. "When energy suppliers started automating their client administration, most of them never imagined they would need to export the data."
Every match between family names, street name and birth date is awarded points. The trick is to define the right rule to match names in the records of energy suppliers with the names in the records of the public administration.
The system also allows citizens to get status updates, and some of the involved public administrations are given access to monitor the dossiers. "We also had to make room for a telephone contact centre, for we became the central point of contact."
Privacy
With privacy laws preventing public administrations of automatically sharing such data, the ministry is forced to create a system that makes very tailored requests to all involved authorities and energy suppliers. One of the side effects is that the Crossroads Bank for Social Security knows that there are 333.710 citizens that may claim fuel subsidies, yet the ministry's registry contains 257.524 entries. "The Crossroads Bank is not allowed to give us their data."
On the plus side, the ministry registry has replaced the paper-based requests in 67 per cent of all cases. And it has increased the number of citizens that get fuel subsidies. "We found that citizens would be turned back by, for example, the energy supplier, and never bothered to take it to the municipality."