Working Group on Automated Decision Review
Developing an auditable standard for the review of automated decisions affecting individuals, drafted with the regulators and engineers who would have to apply it.
This group is drafting a technical standard for the review of automated decisions affecting individuals. Its output is intended to be adoptable directly by supervisory authorities and implementable by the teams building the systems.
The question
Current audit obligations can generally be satisfied without anyone examining whether a system produces defensible decisions. The group is answering a narrower question than the literature usually asks: what would an auditor have to be able to do, and what would they have to publish, for the requirement to be worth imposing?
Composition
The group deliberately includes the people who will have to live with its output: supervisory staff, engineers responsible for deployed systems, caseworkers who exercise override in practice, and representatives of affected communities. A standard drafted without its implementers is a document nobody implements.
Output and timeline
- A draft standard for public comment, with model provisions a regulator can draft from.
- A reference implementation of the audit interface the standard assumes.
- A published record of the positions rejected during drafting, and why.
Working drafts are published as they are produced rather than held until complete. Participation is open — the group is most useful to us when it contains people who expect the draft to fail.
