Competent Authority

A beschikking is only binding when the right body issues it. Income is assessed by the Tax Authority, but a long-term care indication is the CIZ’s to decide, and social assistance is granted by a municipal college. An article records which body that is in competent_authority, the bevoegd gezag. The engine uses it to tell a binding decision apart from a calculation anyone may run (see Multi-Org Execution), and to derive who may authoritatively annotate a law (see Notes and Annotations).

The two forms

competent_authority sits in an article’s machine_readable section and takes one of two shapes.

A named authority, when the body is fixed:

type is either INSTANCE or CATEGORY, defaulting to INSTANCE:

• INSTANCE is one specific organization, named outright. Belastingdienst, CIZ, Minister van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport.
• CATEGORY is a categorical role that resolves to a different concrete body depending on context. “College van burgemeester en wethouders” names a kind of authority; which municipal college is meant depends on the municipality in scope. The distinction tells the engine whether the authority is settled by the article alone or still needs a contextual fact to pin down.

A reference to a computed output, when the authority itself depends on the case:

The # form points at an output computed elsewhere in the same law. The Wet langdurige zorg uses this: which body is competent (2_1_3_bevoegd_gezag) is itself a rule, so the article references the output rather than hard-coding a name.

One law, several authorities

A single law can name a different authority per article, because different articles describe different acts. In the Wet langdurige zorg the indication decision is the CIZ’s, while later articles assign other steps to the Zorgkantoor and the Wlz-uitvoerder. Each article has its own competent_authority. The authority is a property of the act described in the article. A law as a whole has no single competent authority.

Further reading

• Multi-Org Execution - how the competent authority decides execute-vs-accept
• Notes and Annotations - how note authority is derived from the competent authority
• RFC-002: Bevoegdheid - full specification
• Rules as Executed, section 4.3 - the position paper on which authority chooses and publishes an encoding
• Rules as Executed, section 4.6 - the position paper on overrides and discretion