What are other income situations and how can ALIncome handle them, like inconsistent / seasonal income?

[BryceStevenWilley]

I've seen inconsistent income come up several times as weak points in automated calculations (https://points.datasociety.net/trauma-and-automated-welfare-compliance-in-australia-ba661a60b50f, with https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1037969X18815913 as the primary source), and seasonal income is another difficult issue. There are likely complicated court rules about fluctuating income, but some possible things courts might do are to:

• use your last month of income as an example and interpolate out (recency bias)
• ask for expected next month of income (this is what MA courts are implicitly asking for in the Affidavit of Indigency?)
• average your income over the whole year (I believe this is what federal income taxes do)

As it stands, MA's questions are a little vague, and I could imagine that they would be confusing to someone with a complicated job season or have had to recently cycle through jobs. It would be nice to figure out what courts would accept that would be best for indigent litigants, and then encode that into the income classes, or add some clarifying language to the question screens.

[BryceStevenWilley]

Note that to avoid some of the specific problems with calculating amounts higher than people are expecting for their income, we do show people's total monthly income in a few places (on review screens, tables, etc.)

[nonprofittechy]

This is very much a business rule that varies from form to form. Typically there is little flexibility in the information you need to record. They may ask for the 6 most recent paystubs, for example. I like the idea of coming up with some examples for developers though, that match the different proxies for income. And it is certainly worth documenting this, maybe in our how to ask good questions section, so developers can clearly select the right questions to match their rules.

If you want to look at rules around this, the Section 8 calculation rules cover a few different scenarios and lay out when a tenant can use each method.

[BryceStevenWilley]

Thanks for the hint! Dropping a quick link for myself to start on that.

Typically there is little flexibility in the information you need to record. They may ask for the 6 most recent paystubs

That makes sense, so we won't have a ton of room to be flexible.

I am worried about our questions as-are specifically though. In that Australian story above, the issue was that they extrapolated weekly income to get the persons annual income. Our questions give users the flexibility to give us weekly income, and we'll extract it to monthly income. We don't have the flexibility for users to tell us the income is inconsistent though, so we might over or under estimate someone's income for the month (what we would do if we added the ability to tell us, I'm not sure though, maybe just say "what did you earn in the last month?")

[nonprofittechy]

The Australia story is an interesting one. They have done similar audits of income in the US for tenants with similarly disastrous results. The issue really is the automated aspect, though. When people are asked "what is your weekly income" they're a lot more likely to undercount income (leaving out overtime even though they get it every month, e.g.).

One thing that might be helpful is to check the rules and adjust to say something "use the amount that you normally get," or maybe "use the amount that best represents your typical income" if that fits the rules.

[BryceStevenWilley]

From a conversation in SuffolkLITLab/docassemble-AssemblyLine-documentation#310 (comment), I'm realizing this is more urgent than I was previously thinking: ALItemizedJob as is is supposed to be used for different types of income, much of which can be inconsistent, like tips, bonuses, and overtime, so this is something that's affecting our calculations now.

The most concrete thing that I can think of to start is that, independent of specific rules for programs, we need some good ideas of how let people input inconsistent and seasonal information. A wild shot in the dark:

• let authors note a point in the past that we don't care about things before (i.e. 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 6 weeks, etc.)
• ask for any inconsistent income amounts after that point in the past (Have you worked any overtime in the past 3 months? If so, how much?)
• For a qualitative response, just ask if "this is the amount that you normally get, less than you normally get, or more than you normally get?"

Would also help to see how other web forms ask for this info (maybe how tax programs do, since the IRS does have very specific rules for handling seasonal income).

[plocket]

Might be useful to have some feedback [on seasonal income] from @CaroRob here too.

[CaroRob]

Also Self Employed income should probably not go through the itemized job list.
Self employed often is not a choice between hourly and salary income it is an entirely different kettle of fish
I think for self employed income we should follow more along the lines of
How much did you make in your self-employed job last year? Or "How much did you pay yourself last year you expect to make the same this year? Note Massachusetts Financial Statement uses Schedule A for self-employed workers and page 2 might help us thinks about questions for seasonal work as well