Buried here is an important note about one reason why the #CERB and employment insurance (“EI”) application experience has been so good: The design of the #COVID--19 benefits policies themselves, particularly the pivot from ex-ante to ex-post eligibility enforcement. (1/n) https://twitter.com/aaronsnow/status/1247886129744904196

Instead of requiring a lot of process to prove each applicant’s #CERB eligibility before disbursing the benefit, the government kept the application process simple and fast, and will largely deal with errors and fraud come tax filing season next year.

Likewise, the ruleset for obtaining EI, a notoriously complex web of logic and formulae, has itself been radically streamlined, at least for the moment, enabling @ESDC_GC to burn through their application backlog.

Make no mistake, this has been a tremendous feat of IT and UX. But if the policies were complex, the user experience would have been, too. Great interface design can only take you so far, and then calculus is calculus no matter how much you try to make it look like arithmetic.

Relying on ex-post, rather than ex-ante, enforcement is a sharp departure from most government benefits programs, and my US colleagues will tell you it's a largely foreign (sorry) concept there, often to the digital service design community's chagrin.

Just weeks ago it would have been unthinkable in many corners here, too. Insurance companies do it all the time, but their fraud and error tolerances are different. Govts are held to a higher standard of ensuring tax dollars aren't given to anyone who isn't supposed to get them.

But emergencies have a way of exposing that this is often a false choice. Government has lots of ways to play the long game of ensuring benefits integrity. Reconciliation through annual tax filings is just one of them.

And emergencies force everyone to rethink their risk/reward analysis. Right now, the national economic reality has dictated that speed is more important than perfection, despite whatever inevitable bumps in the road loom ahead.

It's hard to overstate how significant a shift this is, and the implications for benefits uptake and delivery. There are endless examples of important benefits are partially or largely "left on the table" by potential beneficiaries until/unless the process is simplified.

In the US, @codeforamerica's work on #GetCalFresh is one of the best examples of how simpler process can result in huge increases in uptake of an important benefit, while the complexity of Florida's unemployment insurance application process notoriously suppresses uptake.

A big open question for Canada is: will it stay this way? Has the risk/reward analysis been permanently altered? I suspect yes, at least in part, and at least until/unless something goes (or is perceived to go) very wrong. Time will tell. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.