Public Finance Methodology

How this data should be read

The observatory follows a claim-scoped chain of official sources: laws and appropriations, Treasury estimates, Controller of Budget withdrawals and implementation reports, procurement records, Auditor-General findings, debt records, project systems and outcome statistics. An official source is used only for the claim it is authorised to establish. An allocation is never presented as a disbursement, expenditure or completed project.

Each public figure must replay deterministically from exact server-fetched source bytes, an admitted source URL and an exact record locator. Fresh, provider-backed adversarial lenses independently check correctness, identity and currency. Every lens must confirm; an unknown or refutation is retained for diagnosis but withheld. The receipt is internally generated, cryptographically attested and append-only. No human approval ceremony is required.

AI may explain the cited record, but it cannot invent a missing amount, turn absence into zero, infer wrongdoing without an audit source, or claim that an outcome was caused by one budget line. Partial source coverage is labelled as a subtotal until the expected official record set is complete.