Fact gate

Fact Gate

Verify every factual, legal, or financial claim against a dated primary source before anything ships. This is a blocking discipline: a draft does not pass until each checkable claim is signed off.

When to use

Any deliverable that cites laws, official figures, statistics, regulations, rates, or deadlines — or whenever someone asks "is this accurate?" / "check this against sources."

The protocol

1. Extract the checkable claims. Walk the draft and pull out every assertion a reader could dispute: numbers, dates, rates, thresholds, named rules, jurisdictions. Restate each as a single, testable sentence.

2. Class each claim. Tag the kind of claim, because each kind has a typical failure mode:

   • Rate / amount — often stale; verify the year it applies to.
   • Threshold / phase-out limit — easy to off-by-one; confirm the exact band.
   • Deadline — confirm the current cycle, not last year's.
   • Jurisdiction / forum — confirm the level (federal vs state, court vs agency); loose phrasing from a single outlet is a classic trap.

3. Match each claim to a dated primary source. Prefer the authoritative issuer (the statute, the official table, the regulator's own page) over a secondary summary. Record the source and its date next to the claim.

4. Block on the unverifiable. If a claim cannot be tied to a primary source, it does not ship as fact. Either soften it to attributed opinion ("according to X…"), or cut it. Never assert a number you could not source.

5. Re-read for the silent claim-classes. Court forum, effective dates, "up to" limits, and percentages are the ones a casual pass skips. Sweep for them explicitly.

Output

A claims ledger: each claim, its class, its dated source, and a status of SIGNED / SOFTENED / CUT. The draft passes only when no claim is left unsigned. If anything is post-dated beyond your knowledge or unsourced, say so plainly rather than guessing.

Honesty rule

"I could not verify this" is a valid, valuable result. A fact gate that waves everything through is not a gate.