Model-Based Simulation of Legal Requirements: Experience from Tax Policy Simulation

Abstract

Abstract-Using models for expressing legal requirements is now commonplace in Requirements Engineering. Models of legal requirements, on the one hand, facilitate communication between software engineers and legal experts, and on the other hand, provide a basis for systematic and automated analysis. The most prevalent application of legal requirements models is for checking the compliance of software systems with laws and regulations. In this experience paper, we explore a complementary application of legal requirements models, namely simulation. We observe that, in domains such as taxation, the same models that underlie legal compliance analysis bring important added value by enabling simulation. Concretely, this paper reports on the model-based simulation of selected legal requirements (policies) derived from Luxembourg's Income Tax Law. The simulation scenario considered in the paper is aimed at analyzing the impact of a current tax law reform proposal in Luxembourg. We describe our approach for simulation along with empirical results demonstrating the feasibility and accuracy of the approach. We further present lessons learned from the experience.

Synthetic data generation for statistical testing

“…The literals in O and U are derived as follows: We compare in a pairwise manner the relative frequencies of the actual characteristics of S against the desired characteristics in H desired (L. [13][14][15]. To illustrate, consider rows 2 and 3 of Table I.…”

“…Although motivated by microeconomic simulation [13] rather than software testing, our previous approach provides a useful basis for generating data that can be used for statistical testing. However, the approach suffers from an important limitation: while the approach generates synthetic data that is aligned with a desired set of statistical distributions and has shown to be good enough for running financial simulations [14], the approach cannot guarantee the satisfaction of logical constraints that need to be enforced over the generated data.…”

A set of prescribed activities for enhancing requirements engineering in the development of usable e-Government applications

“…In general, the processing of usability, stakeholder and legislation requirements together is rarely systematized, and it greatly differs from one approach to another. Most of existing approaches consider stakeholders, legislation and usability as a source or nonfunctional requirements, and they are commonly catalogued and barely discerned for a proper and joint analysis [8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. In fact, the correct handling of non-functional requirements can be identified as one of the most important areas of research [8].…”

“…However, this approach is mainly focused on the architectural design, lacking of a concrete requirements engineering process. Other approaches make use of models for representing legal requirements in a specific context [14]. However, while reporting important added value by enabling simulation, stakeholder and legislation requirements should be analyzed together, in order to identify conflicts of interests in a broader context, such as in e-Government applications.…”

The Grace Period Has Ended: An Approach to Operationalize GDPR Requirements

“…They identified that most methodologies do not provide mechanisms to articulate effectively the (potential) unwritten rules that might influence legal reasoning, such as the context of the legal scenario. Finally, Soltana et al [23] explored the potential usage of legal requirements models in simulated scenarios, such as taxation.…”