Digital Financial Reporting

An excellent paper by Michael Genesereth of Stanford University's Center for Legal Informatics, Computational Law: The Cop in the Backseat, provides insight into what is about to happen to financial accounting, reporting, and auditing.

The paper provides this definition of computational law and example of a rudimentary computational law system:

Computational Law is that branch of legal informatics concerned with the codification of regulations in precise, computable form. From a pragmatic perspective, Computational Law is important as the basis for computer systems capable of doing useful legal calculations, such as compliance checking, legal planning, regulatory analysis, and so forth.

Intuit's Turbotax is a simple example of a rudimentary Computational Law system. Millions use it each year to prepare their tax forms. Based on values supplied by its user, it automatically computes the user's tax obligations and fills in the appropriate tax forms. If asked, it can supply explanations for its results in the form of references to the relevant portions of the tax code.

Given that statutory and regulatory financial accounting and auditing rules are effectively laws, it does not take much imagination to see the possibilities here.  This helps one understand why things like the Logical Theory Describing Financial Report are actually very important.

A detailed but technical example of computational law is the British Nationality Act as a logic program.

Seems like these guys have the same idea that I do related to "blocks": Blawx | GitHub | Demo

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Potential for bias and discrimination

LegalBlocks (Blockchain)

Why Computational Law?