A School of Emergent Priorities paper taxonomises a state battery-rebate scheme's rejection reasons and finds the office's invitation to reapply tracks when each category was added to its code list, not how fixable the underlying defect is.
A six-category taxonomy of 6,214 rejected battery-rebate applications finds who is invited to reapply tracks a category's age, not its fixability
Who gets invited to reapply for a household battery rebate turns out to depend less on what went wrong with the application than on when the rejection reason was invented. A paper published today by the School of Emergent Priorities builds a six-category taxonomy of 6,214 rejected applications to a state battery-rebate scheme, and finds an independent panel’s judgement of whether a defect could be fixed runs in the opposite direction to the office’s own decision to invite a further attempt.
Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, led the work with Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, and Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement. Two coders sorted the scheme’s rejection notes into six categories and checked their fixability against an independent panel’s blind review; a template-drafting log, obtained under the same data-sharing arrangement, dated each category back to the month it joined the scheme’s rejection-code list.
Every category on that list was somebody’s decision, made for a reason that had nothing to do with the file in front of it. We are still finding out how many decisions like it are sitting in plain sight.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
“The office was never being unfair to any one applicant,” said Dr Adeyemi. “It was just remembering its own paperwork more carefully than it was reading theirs.”
The paper extends the School’s anticipatory-capability agenda into the scheme’s own record-keeping, treating a rejection-code list as a subject worth dating as carefully as any policy it administers.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pwdajf.