Digital Financial Reporting

As explained by Jason Morris, The main idea behind Rules as Code is that government legislation, statutory rules, regulation, and policy can and should be co-drafted in two languages at the same time: (1) in natural human language as it is now; and (2) in a machine-readable and machine-executable language. Both versions of rules would be published side-by-side.

When I say "rules" I include financial accounting rules, financial reporting rules, financial audit rules and such.

Why do this?  There are a number of reasons. 

• This approach helps to detect and remove ambiguity in rules, making the rules better. By going through the effort of encoding the rule, issues become very apparent. This co-drafting forces rule creators to be precise.
• This approach allows for loopholes to be discovered when writing the rules, rather than after the rule has been officially published.
• This approach allows for machines to be leveraged to test rules and to test for unexpected results when creating rules.
• This provides a single, authoritative interpretation of what the rule means.
• This simplifies the automation of government services.
• This would make something like computational professional services work nicely.

So, before you jump to any rash conclusions let me clarify some things.  First, what if the natural human readable language and the machine readable language could be the SAME language? Say something like Logical English. Other alternatives would be some visual modeling language or a specially designed language based on the domain.  Second, personally I don't like the term "code".  What I think they mean is to use a declarative logical programming language as contrast to an imperative language. Third, this is not about professionals "learning to code".

For more information about Rules as Code, see: 

• Better Rules for Government Discovery Report
• Ted Talk
• Blawx: Rules as Code Demonstration
• Rules as Code Showcase
• Stanford University, FutureLaw 2019, Government as a Platform
• Rules as Code Can, and Should be Done Without Programmers
• Playing Along with Rules as Code
• Computational Law: The Cop in the Back Seat
• More information