Ottawa’s solution to benefits service issues? Artificial intelligence

OTTAWA — Federal officials overseeing billions in benefit payments to millions of Canadians are hoping artificial intelligence can resolve ongoing snags in the system.

The government is looking to “push the boundaries” of what artificial intelligence can do to improve a variety of services, including the pace of benefit decisions to Canadians applying for disability pensions, say documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the access to information law.

Employment and Social Development Canada is currently facing processes that are “slow, inefficient, inconsistent and prone to error,” reads a presentation about the AI efforts.

Instead of being able to proactively change the way federal services are delivered to Canadians, the documents say, officials are bogged down with millions of “low value” issues that need to be taken care of, crowding out more critical work.

Among the “low value” work are about 50,000 tasks required to issue tax forms to Canada Pension Plan and old age security recipients.

Machine learning could also eliminate the need to have staff review hundreds of public consultation submissions to find key issues and themes.

One of the first small-scale projects to test this new approach for the department — and to demonstrate its future potential for other services — is a predictive analytics program launched this spring to triage CPP disability applications and speed up benefit decisions.

The Liberals are overseeing changes to the CPP disability program stemming from a critical auditor general review that questioned the length and quality of decision-making.

Michael Ferguson’s 2016 report on the $4-billion disability benefits system found that some onethird of applicants who were originally denied benefits were later found to be eligible, based on the initial evidence.

Often people experience unnecessary delays, denials and appeals concerning applications missing supporting medical documents.