Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: a number gets repeated in personal finance until it stops being checkable — the source drops off, the year drops off, and what is left is a sentence everyone quotes and nobody can trace. The Provenance File traces them. This page is the published standard it works to, so you can judge the audits rather than trust them.
The pipeline, in the order it must run
Every audit runs these four steps, and the order is not cosmetic — the verdict class is chosen from the evidence, so the evidence has to be assembled before anyone is allowed to have an opinion about it.
- Trace the claim to the earliest version we can actually find, with a link and the date we read it. Not “studies show” — a document.
- Test what that origin actually measured. This is where most of them break. The question a survey asked, the population it sampled, the year it ran, and whether the sentence in circulation is the sentence the source supports.
- Compute or assemble the honest current figure from primary sources — our own statute tables where we own the data, the underlying microdata where we can compute it, the current published source where we cannot.
- Verdict, from the fixed taxonomy below.
If step 1 fails, that is a result and it gets published. A claim whose origin cannot be found after a real search is more interesting than one that checks out.
The verdict taxonomy, fixed before the evidence
These six classes are registered in advance and do not change to fit a finding. An audit picks its class from the evidence; it never reshapes the class around the conclusion.
| Verdict | What it means |
|---|---|
| CONFIRMED | The claim is accurate and current, and the source supports the sentence as it circulates. This is a real possible outcome and we expect to reach it. |
| OUTDATED | It was accurate when published and the world moved. No fault in the original; the fault is in repeating it undated. |
| MUTATED | The number is real and has been attached to the wrong question — right figure, wrong meaning. In our experience this is the most common failure by a distance. |
| INCOMPLETE | Every word is true and the sentence still misleads, because what it leaves out changes the decision a reader would make. |
| UNSUPPORTED | We searched and could not find a primary basis. This is a statement about our search, not a finding that the claim is false, and the audit says exactly where we looked. |
| FALSE | A primary source contradicts it. The highest bar here, and the rarest. |
Two of those classes exist because of arguments we had with ourselves. INCOMPLETE was added before the first audit ran, because we had a candidate — “a grace period keeps your life insurance in force” — where every word is true and 47 of 51 states let the insurer take the unpaid premium out of the death benefit anyway. Calling that false would have been wrong and calling it confirmed would have been useless. We registered the class before assembling the evidence, because adding a category after you see the answer is the exact practice this desk exists to criticise.
UNSUPPORTED exists to stop us doing the other thing. Failing to find a source is not the same as proving there is none, and a desk that blurs those two is more dangerous than the claims it audits.
The desk laws
These bind every audit on this site. They are published because a standard you cannot read is not a standard.
- We audit claims, never people or companies. Provenance is named as fact — who published what, when, with a link and the date we read it. No motive is attributed, ever. A publisher repeating a wrong number is almost always doing what everyone else did, which is the interesting part and not a character flaw.
- No mockery. If a sentence would embarrass someone to no analytical purpose, it does not run.
- Every statement about a third party must be independently verifiable by a reader following our links. Quotes are exact, minimal, and attributed.
- Verdicts are pre-registered. The taxonomy above is fixed; the evidence picks the class.
- Hedge discipline. An audit never claims beyond its evidence tier. Where we read a statute, we say so. Where we read a summary of a statute, we say that instead — those are different things and the difference has changed our own conclusions.
- The universal-negative law, doubly. “There is no source for this” and “no state does X” are the hardest claims to make honestly. We either enumerate what we searched or we hedge the sentence. We have downgraded our own published findings to unconfirmed rather than assert a negative on weak sourcing, and we will do it here.
- When we are wrong, the page says so. Not a silent edit — a dated correction on the page itself, and a line in the correction log.
Evidence tiers, and why we print them
Every audit states what it actually read, because “statute” and “a site reproducing a statute” are not the same tier and the difference is not theoretical: we have caught a commercial code site serving superseded text under a “current through” label. Primary is the issuing body’s own document. Official is a government agency restating it. Reproduction is a third party publishing the verbatim text. Secondary is anything describing it.
An audit’s verdict may not exceed its weakest load-bearing tier. That rule costs us conclusions and it is the reason to trust the ones that survive.
What this desk is not
It is not a rating of publishers, a list of bad actors, or a running score. There is no leaderboard and there will not be one. It is not about opinions, forecasts or advice — only about claims that assert a checkable fact.
And it is separate from our own methodology, which covers how we build our numbers, and from our corrections log, which covers when we get them wrong. This page covers how we check everyone else. Holding others to a standard we do not publish for ourselves would be its own kind of evasion.
Cite this
Clear Money Guide, How We Check Money Claims: the Provenance File standard, 2026. https://clearmoneyguide.com/how-we-check-money-claims/. Reusable under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to Clear Money Guide.
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