Check our work

Each lead links to the government records used to create it. This page explains how to check those records, what the site checks before publication, and the limits of those checks.

Every number traces to a file

Open a provider page and select a flag to see the records behind it — the owner's name, the counts, the dollar amounts — each one linked. Click through and you land on the actual government row, laid out line by line, with Open the raw file at the bottom for the original on the government's own site.

The source table lists each value on the page with the file it was read from, the date the publisher says it is current to, the day we downloaded it, and the weekly version it belongs to. The files are re-pulled every Monday and each pull is kept as its own version — see what changed any week.

How to check a lead yourself

1. Open a lead from the board and read why it was flagged.
2. Click the flag card. The records behind it are listed with links — an owner's enrollment row, a payment line, an exclusion-list entry.
3. Follow the link. You get the government's own record, pre-filtered to the exact row, not a summary of it.
4. Use Open the raw file to load the government's data feed directly.
5. Names can coincide and ownership can change. Confirm identity and dates before drawing a conclusion.

What we check before anything is published

• Every flag and every detail is checked against the file it came from. Anything with no source, an out-of-date pull, or a dead record link is logged, and a lead whose flags cannot be traced at all is held back from the board.
• After every weekly pull, every payment and exclusion flag is reconciled against the stored source rows. A separate rotating sample is re-fetched from the government's own files to catch corrections made after download.
• Each file download is logged with its status, row count and duration. A failed pull, an empty file, a sudden row drop, or a changed column layout opens a problem alert shown on the data sources page.
• A failed release keeps the last known-good public data in place. Leads with blocking source problems stay off the board, even when a failed import affects many records.

Where we fall short

• Only the 2024 payment file exists so far, so there are no trend flags yet.
• Some map pins are placed at the centre of a ZIP code rather than the exact address, and say so.
• County-level figures warn when the sample is small, because percentages swing wildly.
• Name matches on the exclusion list can coincide — every one of them needs a person to confirm the identity before it means anything.

Disagree with something?

Submit a correction if a record is wrong, a link is broken, or a flag has a documented explanation. Government source changes appear after the next weekly import.