Accelerating Citizen Payouts with Intelligent Automation
Behind every tax form submitted to a government agency is a citizen navigating a critical life moment – whether it’s recovering work-related expenses, authorizing a representative, or requesting a tax repayment. In the public sector, delays in document processing can directly impact the people depending on timely support. That’s why one major government department turned to Hyperscience to modernize its document workflows – ensuring faster, more accurate service delivery across its programs.
The Challenge: Slow, Manual Document Processing
The agency receives a wide variety of tax-related forms by mail, many of which are handwritten and submitted by digitally excluded or averse individuals. Among the most common are:
- Agent authorization forms: Required to grant permission to representatives – delays can hold up critical taxpayer resolutions.
- Tax repayment requests: Often submitted by retirees or low-income individuals – delays impact citizens relying on timely financial support.
- Tax credit transfer requests: Used to request the transfer of tax credits between accounts – often tied to financial hardship or life changes where timely processing is critical.
- Withholding tax returns: Filed to report and pay income tax on interest or other annual payments – delays or errors can expose the agency and filers to compliance risks and financial penalties.
Each of these documents must be handled with precision before they can move into backend systems. When turnaround times stretch into weeks or even months, the impact is deeply felt by citizens expecting and counting on financial relief. Previously, these forms were scanned and manually reviewed by internal teams, who performed data entry and validation checks before the information could move into backend systems. For certain forms, manual processing could take over an hour per document. High volumes and complex business rules added to the burden, creating backlogs, slowing turnaround times and extending the wait for citizens expecting funds. Beyond the direct impact to citizens, the agency’s employees were overwhelmed by repetitive, labor-intensive tasks – leading to operational inefficiencies and rising internal costs to maintain service levels. These delays also placed pressure on the agency’s contact centres, where staff were inundated with calls from citizens chasing progress – an issue that unnecessarily consumed millions of additional staff hours annually.
The Solution: Scalable, Secure Automation with Hyperscience
To address these challenges, the agency selected Hyperscience to reimagine its manual document workflows with intelligent extraction and automation. Hyperscience provides automated extraction of handwritten forms, scales to meet growing demand, and operates within a secure, on-premises environment aligned with government standards, including Cyber Essentials Plus and FedRAMP High.
Instead of relying solely on human-centered processes, the agency now deploys digital workers – machine learning models specifically trained on the tax forms it processes – to automatically convert non-machine-readable documents into structured, high-quality data. Leveraging Hyperscience’s human-in-the-loop approach, which flags individual fields for human validation when model confidence falls below a defined threshold, knowledge workers are now engaged only when needed – ensuring accuracy while dramatically reducing manual effort.
Hyperscience is now deeply integrated with the agency’s existing infrastructure, including legacy scanning partners and their customer service platform, to enable a seamless, end-to-end solution. What once took over an hour per form can now be completed in under a minute. The Hyperscience platform’s configurable accuracy and ability to handle highly varied form types made it a strong fit for the agency’s needs, while also providing a foundation for future expansion into other use cases across the department.
The Results: Faster Turnaround, Better Citizen Experience
By embracing automation and AI, the agency is achieving 99% accuracy on the tax forms it processes – resulting in a dramatic reduction in turnaround times for critical form submissions. This breakthrough has transformed the citizen experience, cutting wait times from 45 days to under 1 day in certain cases and delivering faster access to the financial support people rely on.
Impact at a Glance: Before and After Hyperscience
| Metric | Before Hyperscience | After Hyperscience |
|---|---|---|
| Processing Time | Up to 45 days | 1 day or less |
| Manual Work | Over 1 hour per document | Under 1 minute per document |
| Citizen Experience | Delayed, error-prone | Fast, reliable, accurate |
The benefits to the agency extend beyond just speed and better experiences for their constituents. By eliminating manual data entry for routine tasks, the agency was able to reassign over 300 team members to higher-value roles – enhancing both employee satisfaction and organizational efficiency.
Now, for every document received by this agency, there’s a faster, more reliable path to service – delivering a citizen experience that puts people, not paperwork, at the center.