Trust

How a number gets onto this site

The datum

Nothing here is a bare value. Every asserted value is stored as a record with a fixed shape: the value, its citation, the source URL it came from, the date it was retrieved, a confidence grade, and, where a value could not be settled from a published source, the exact question we need to ask the agency by phone to settle it.

Confidence means something specific. High is the statute or the official schedule read verbatim. Medium is an official source that is indirect or possibly stale for the assertion being made. Low is an inference, and a low-confidence value is never published without saying so.

The governing rule, applied everywhere: unclear beats guess. If the official source does not settle a value, it is recorded as unresolved. We never fabricate a citation, a fee, or a date, and we never render a gap as a zero. On the cost ranking that distinction is load-bearing: a state with no franchise taxFranchise taxA recurring tax on the privilege of existing as an entity in a state - not a tax on franchising a business.Read the full entry → and a state whose record does not resolve the LLC case look identical if both are printed as $0, and they are not the same finding at all.

Official sources only

The only acceptable authorities are the state's filing agency, the state legislature, and the official code publisher. Aggregators, law-firm marketing pages, and vendor sites may help us locate a citation. They are never the authority for one.

The review gate

Every record moves along a ladder: collected → provisionally reviewed → verified → published. A citation is never displayed publicly below verified. That is enforced in the build, not in a style guide: the generator refuses to emit it.

This has a visible consequence that is worth stating rather than hiding. The governance rules carry 371 verbatim statutory quotations, and the registered-agent profiles carry hundreds more. They are not on this site. Their plain-language summaries are, because a summary of a public rule is a public fact, but the citations and the quotations are withheld, because rendering a citation is claiming a verification. The one dataset that has been through final review appears in full, quotations and all, on the statutes page. The contrast between those two treatments is the review gateReview gateThis site's publication rule. Records climb unreviewed, then provisionally reviewed, then verified; public pages cite only verified records.Read the full entry → working, not the review gate failing.

There is a second, independent test. A record's provenance can be internal even after a record has cleared final review, so we also check where the source points:

Of the 3313 fee records in the canonical spine, 263 were acquired from an internal database and 172 from an archived evidence capture. 3132 now carry an official agency or statute URL as their authority, attached by an independent re-verification of every record against the agency's own published schedule on 2026-09-04; those render as verified. The acquisition history stays in each record as evidence. The 181 that do not are shown as pending review, each with the reason on its jurisdiction page.

The named reviewer of record

The 534 statute citations were signed off by a named individual on a recorded date. Publishing a reviewer's name is a genuine credibility asset and it is also a decision that belongs to the person being named, so this prototype shows the review status and the review date and withholds the name pending that decision. A production site should carry a named person with stated credentials or no byline at all. What it must never carry is a fabricated author persona.

Where the record actually stands today

Being able to say that 3313 fee records are held back from a verified badge is a stronger statement about this site than a green tick on all of them would be. The full inventory, including per-jurisdiction coverage and the known gaps, is on the coverage page.

Derived numbers

Rankings, totals, medians, spreads and counts on the analysis pages are computed at build time from the records they summarise. None of them is stored. A correction to one fee record therefore propagates to every ranking that touches it without anyone remembering to update a summary, and a figure on an analysis page can never disagree with the same figure on a jurisdiction page. Where a component of a computation is missing, the whole computation is reported as a gap rather than being completed with a default.

Monitoring

Official sources are re-checked on a schedule rather than when somebody remembers. Each record shows the date it was retrieved and the date of its next scheduled recheck, and the small ring beside the date fills as that interval elapses. 351 sources are under scheduled recheck. When a monitored source changes, a change package is opened, evidence is captured, and the correction flows to every page that depends on it.

How corrections are published

Corrections are published through an allowlist of 7 fields: jurisdiction, transaction, entity typeEntity typesLLC (limited liability company), corporation (for-profit; 'profit corporation' in some states' vocabulary), nonprofit corporation, LP (limited partnership), LLP (limited liability partnership), LLLP (limited liability limited partnership),Read the full entry →, field, old value, new value, and effective date, plus a public authority where one exists. Nothing else reaches the page. Where a correction was verified against records we cannot publish, the entry says exactly that rather than omitting the change or implying a source we do not have.

Corrections from readers

If a value here is wrong, we want to know, and the report goes into the same triage queue as everything else. Every reported discrepancy is classified, researched against official sources, and either folded into the record with evidence or closed with a stated reason.

Scope

Nothing here is legal or tax advice. incFACTS publishes the record; it does not file documents for you. Commercial relationships, when they exist, are disclosed on the page where they appear.

incFACTS, "Methodology - how a number gets onto this site," FACTS repository v0.10.08 (data as of 2026-09-21), https://www.incfacts.com/methodology/ (accessed 2026-09-21).

incFACTS, Methodology - how a number gets onto this site, https://www.incfacts.com/methodology/ (last visited 2026-09-21).

@misc{incfacts_methodology_2026,
  author = {incFACTS (FACTS repository)},
  title = {Methodology - how a number gets onto this site},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.incfacts.com/methodology/},
  note = {v0.10.08, data as of 2026-09-21, accessed 2026-09-21}
}