All,
I'm a programmer for software used to process various types of welfare
programs for the state of Texas. Part of the task involved in
certifying a client for benefits includes a verification of income.
One category of income is earned income.
Earned income usually has a pay period of weekly, biweekly, or
monthly, and existing processes have conversions appropriate to each.
If a client is unable to verify his earned income using one of the
accepted forms of documentation, the benefit is either pended until
such documentation is produced or denied for no documentation. In an
effort to decrease the number of such denials, a new project has been
initiated to verify income from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC).
TWC maintains work-related data for Texas employees. The information
they have is stored by quarter. The current design document instructs
us to convert from the quarterly income amount to weekly, biweekly, or
monthly figures by first converting to monthly by dividing by 3 and
then converting to weekly or biweekly be dividing by 4.33 and 2.17,
respectively. Final quotients are rounded to the nearest cent.
One of the members of the meeting we had yesterday worked up a couple
of examples and realized there was a discrepancy of a cent and
wondered what to do about it. I replied that a cent difference here
and there was nothing when compared to the discrepancy from quarters
not being integer multiples of weeks. I expounded that while most
quarters have 13 weeks (which differs from the 12.99 you would get
using the recommended formula), some only have 12 weeks, and some have
as many as 14 weeks. Which quarters those are depends upon how the
weeks are divided up.
Anyway, since approval or denial of a claim depends on whether income
is above or below some poverty level, a claimant could potentially be
certified using TWC and denied with actual pay stubs or vice versa.
In my experience, when something like this is possible, it invariably
comes to pass with the volume of data we process (about 3.5 million
cases per year).
Victor
