Attribution periods refer to the timelines over which evidence is used in case eligibility and entitlement determination. The attributed evidence entity is used to store information regarding the effective time period for an active evidence record.
Most evidence has business dates associated with it; however, often these dates are not directly used for case eligibility and entitlement determination. For example, an employment will have a start and end date; however, the business requirement can be that this piece of evidence should be considered for case eligibility and entitlement on month-aligned or quarter-aligned dates. While business start and end dates such as an employment start and end date influence the attribution dates, they are not explicitly used by the case eligibility and entitlement determination process.
By storing the attributed evidence information in an entity separate from the custom evidence which may contain business dates, users are free to maintain business dates without having to understand how or if those dates will impact case eligibility and entitlement. It is the system, rather than the user, that performs the calculations to determine when active evidence is effective.
It is important to note that attributed evidence records are not created for integrated cases. Each attributed evidence record pertains to a particular product delivery case. When evidence is activated at the integrated case level, the system creates an attributed evidence record for each product delivery case that shares the evidence record. For example, an integrated case may have three product delivery cases within it that share the income evidence for a household. Any income evidence record activated will result in three separate attributed evidence records for each of the product delivery cases.
The system checks for product delivery cases within an integrated case before it creates any attributed evidence records. If there are no product delivery cases within the integrated case at the time an evidence record is activated, then the system will not create attributed evidence records for the active evidence. Later, when product delivery cases are added to the integrated case, the system will create the necessary attributed evidence records.
The following table describes each of the attributes in the attributed evidence entity:
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Attributed Evidence ID | Unique identifier of the attributed evidence record. This is the primary key used to identify the attributed evidence record in the system. |
| Evidence Descriptor ID | Identifier of the related evidence descriptor record. During case eligibility and entitlement determination process, the system uses this ID to retrieve the evidence information to be used in the eligibility and entitlement determination. |
| Case ID | Identifier of the related product delivery case. This ID links the attribution period for an active evidence record to the product delivery case that uses this evidence for eligibility and entitlement determination processing. |
| Attributed From Date | Start date of the period over which evidence is used in case eligibility and entitlement determination. When checking eligibility and entitlement for a product delivery case, the system will retrieve evidence whose attribution periods are in-line with the eligibility and entitlement period. |
| Attributed To Date | End date of the period over which evidence is used in case eligibility and entitlement determination. |