Jacobs and Associates introduces E*RIA™
– a software solution that brings regulatory development
into the e-Government era

Many governments and regulatory agencies are working to improve the quality of new laws and ministerial rules by building internal processes for drafting and development, quality control, regulatory impact analysis, and stakeholder consultation. Yet building good regulatory practices across many ministries and agencies is difficult, costly, and slow.

e*RIA is the first integrated software solution for systematizing the entire process of developing draft laws and other regulations through better design, RIA, stakeholder consultation, and quality control so that governments can produce higher quality, more market-friendly regulations at lower cost. e*RIA is an e-Government platform designed from concrete experiences and OECD best practices. To produce this innovative e-Government platform, Jacobs and Associates has teamed with The Ergo Group, a leading technology provider in the e-Government field.

e*RIA:

• seamlessly ties together all government agencies into a single, fast, coordinated, paperless, collaborative and transparent process. Governments can track and coordinate legal and regulatory projects from inception to adoption;

• guides regulators in drafting regulations and conducting regulatory analyses with the help of prompts and templates that improve decision-making. e*RIA integrates every step of successful regulatory impact analysis from design of the process to identification of impacts to consultation and review by independent experts;

• provides an effective process for stakeholder consultation and publication on each regulation and RIA. e*RIA is a tool for greater regulatory transparency and stakeholder participation. It can be designed to produce an online registry of regulations to expand access for businesses and citizens.

• helps regulators through the process of reviewing, formatting, and submitting the draft to a regulatory oversight body (the regulatory review and management function recommended by the OECD).

We provide a full range of services to ensure that e*RIA works for you, including customization of the software in close consultation with your government, on-site implementation, user training, and user support. For further information, contact Fran Wall at janda@regulatoryreform.com.

Detailed Description of the e-RIA System

What is e-RIA?

The e-RIA system is a web-based management application specifically designed to support government regulatory reform programs, such as Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) and quality control processes.

e-RIA is the first integrated software solution for systematizing the entire process of developing draft laws and regulations through better design, RIA, consultation,  and quality control so that governments can produce higher quality, more market-friendly regulations at lower cost.

e-RIA is an e-Government platform designed from concrete experiences and OECD best practices, and inspired by solutions already implemented in Mexico.

e-RIA:

• Seamlessly ties together all government agencies into a single, fast, coordinated, paperless, collaborative and transparent management process. It is designed to help implement government-wide regulatory quality policies and tools. Governments can better track, monitor, and coordinate legal and regulatory projects through all of the steps from inception to adoption;
• Guides regulators in drafting regulations and conducting regulatory analyses with the help of prompts and templates that improve decision-making. It integrates every step of the client government’s process, including regulatory impact analysis, process design, identification of impacts, stakeholder consultation, and review by independent experts;
• Provides a process for stakeholder consultation and publication on each regulation and RIA. E*RIA is a tool for greater regulatory transparency and stakeholder participation.
• Produces an online registry of regulations to expand access for businesses and citizens.
• Helps regulators to review, format, and submit the draft to a regulatory oversight body (as recommended by the OECD).

e-RIA spans the intra-governmental divide: it offers an application for regulators with personalized secure “inboxes” in which they can collaboratively draft, review, and sub­mit regulatory projects and RIAs. This same application is used by the central oversight or management body to track, receive, review, and publish regulatory proposals and RIAs.

Benefits to Government from Adoption of e-RIA

e-RIA delivers benefits to governments that adopt the platform in three broad areas:

1.      Regulatory quality

Governments that adopt regulatory reform programs and regulatory quality principles have the difficult job of institutionalizing those reforms into the machinery of day to day operations of government across many bodies. e-RIA provides both a management tool for implementing such procedures and a help function to guide regulators. It incorporates international best practices and guidelines for regulatory quality with local legal requirements into the regulatory drafting, RIA, consultation, and review process.

e-RIA is specifically configured for each government. The choices about configuration are extremely flexible. The system builds the practices and steps that the client government wants regulators to follow in the development and quality control process. The system then guides regulators as they perform their work, by offering tailored questionnaires in a wizard-like format that reflect the built-in guidelines. It is possible to build self enforcement into the tool to ensure that projects that skip steps or fail to answer key questions cannot advance.

This feature helps to generate a higher and more uniform quality for Regulatory Impact Analysis and other quality procedures across ministries, departments and agencies, thus improving the overall quality of the regulatory process.

2.      Process Efficiency

e-RIA is a process oriented software application. This means that every item that is worked on follows a predetermined process that is transparent, predictable and auditable. The specifics of the process will be configured for your government based on the applicable legal and administrative framework complemented by international best practices chosen by the client. Thus implementation of e-RIA leads to processes that are fully documented and can be easily reviewed and modified as required.

Moreover, because the system assigns responsibilities for each step in the process to specific government officials and staff, it makes it possible to track performance and schedules, identify bottlenecks and audit any part of the process.

This feature generates efficiencies in ministry response times, reduces error rates and the need for rework, helps better prepare workloads at administrative and political levels, and makes audits hassle-free.

3.      Transparency and collaboration

e-RIA is designed to be used as a collaborative tool. Access is given to staff from multiple ministries or departments and work items go back and forth across organizational boundaries in an efficient and accountable manner.

e-RIA generates reports and views that make it possible to publish Regulatory Impact Analyses, ministry and public comments, and any other part of the regulatory case file that is needed to a publicly available web portal.

These features generate gains in inter-agency collaboration as well as greater transparency towards the public

Application Components

The e-RIA application is composed of the following components:

• A centralized, safe database for all regulatory documents.
• A flexible and customizable workflow engine for implementing the RIA processes.
• A web based user interface for ministry and regulatory oversight body personnel for manipulating the system.
• An external, public web portal.
• An easy to use reporting tool for development of custom reports based on the data in the system.
• Web services for accessing the application’s functionalities from other systems.
• A full API (application programming interface) for further development and integration with other internal government systems.

Flexibility, Customization and Integration

Contrary to some enterprise systems, e-RIA is not a one size fits all solution. e-RIA is designed to adapt to the specific needs, practices and processes of governments.

e-RIA is fully customized with each implementation, and it can incorporate any combination of available features and modules. When e-RIA is deployed, our team of professionals work closely with our client to determine what modules, features and processes will be implemented, how the data will be organized and the different levels of access that will be configured.

Some of the available modules and features are as follows:

• Step by Step e-RIA Process
• Interagency Collaboration processes during drafting
• Guided e-RIA (Questionnaires)
• e-Registry
• Public Comment process
• Audit trail
• User Inbox
• Meeting Scheduling
• Online Meetings (third party add-on and licensing may be required)
• Document management
• Publication to government portals
• Online Help

Ontario has an internet-based public “regulatory registry” for regulatory proposals that posts regulatory proposals and invites public comment and an internet-based public “e-Laws” system that is an official source for statutes and regulations. In this context, e-RIA could be implemented in such a way that it pushes regulations that are ready for public comment into the public regulatory registry application, and does the same with regard to the e-Laws system when the regulatory review process has been completed and the regulation becomes law.

Obviously the specifics of how this integration would work have to be determined once the client’s specs are fully elaborated, but e-RIA has the built-in flexibility to generate data that can be exported to any other system, as well as to connect to other systems in order to reference pre-existing data that should not be replicated in e-RIA. In any case, it is not necessary to scrap existing systems in order to achieve integration with e-RIA.

The existing mechanisms in place to do this in e-RIA are:

• A full Application Programming Interface that allows us to develop system interfaces, as well as import or export programs;
• A Web Services API that allows other systems to connect to e-RIA without the need for interfaces, and also allows e-RIA to consume third party web services.