Abstract: Receiving information associated with a health care service provided to a patient; distributing a plurality of rules for determining responsibility for payment for the health care service across a plurality of hierarchical computer-implemented auditing systems including a primary auditing system and a secondary auditing system; generating, using the primary auditing system, a first payment recommendation for the health care service based on a first subset of the plurality of rules and the information associated with the health care service; communicating the information associated with the health care service to the secondary auditing system; generating, using the secondary auditing system, a second payment recommendation for the health care service based on a second subset of the plurality of rules and the information associated with the health care service; and merging the first payment recommendation with the second payment recommendation to generate a final payment recommendation for the health care servi