How findings are made

Arxo builds the result from the authoritative text and compares it with what was published, computed or programmed from it: an amending law against the text it amends, the Federal Register against the eCFR, a statutory formula against a published table, one language version of an act against another, an official guide against the code it restates.

AI reads the texts, turns provisions into executable rules and builds the checks; Arxo executes them. A person decides what counts as a defect: every finding is checked and approved by one of us before it is sent, and each record states the role of AI and the date of that approval. Our rules are set out in Responsible Disclosure of Defects in Law.

What each record contains

• The place. Act, edition, article, paragraph or table cell.
• Who issued the text. The country, or, for a text that no state issued, such as a standard or an international instrument, the body that issued it. Such a text is not assigned a country.
• The quotation. Verbatim from a copy of the official material, with its address, the date it was retrieved and the SHA-256 of the bytes. The copy we used is kept in the register. Translations are ours and are marked as such.
• The check. What was compared and how the discrepancy was reproduced: a pair of quotations, an amending instruction traced through the text it amends, a value built from the statutory formula and compared with the published one, or recorded observations of a service.
• Where it arose. The text of the act, an amending act, the official publication, the consolidated text, a published figure or a program. When this is not established, the record says so.
• Who was told. The institutions responsible for the provision, its publication and the system that applies it, with the date and the channel.
• How to check it without our tools. Where to find each passage in the official source and what to compare.
• What happened next. Replies, editorial notes and corrections, each with the official document and its date.

Disclosure

• A finding is published on the day every responsible institution has been told. We do not wait for a reply, and a reply is not a condition of publication.
• A discrepancy between language versions that depends on how words are read is published after a specialist in that language and legal system has checked it. A different number, threshold sign or negation is shown by the quotations themselves.
• A commitment given to the press may hold a record until a stated date and time.
• A discrepancy that an official document had already corrected before our check is published as "Corrected before our report".
• Findings still under examination are not published.
• The same rules apply to a standard or another text that no state issued. The body that issued it is told through the channel it provides for corrections or issues.

Status

Each record keeps separate facts: our conclusion, the reports we sent, the addressee's response and the state of the official text. The badge shown on the page is computed from them.

• Reported. The institutions have been told; there is no substantive reply yet.
• Accepted by the addressee. The institution agreed or said it would act; nothing official has been published yet.
• Addressee takes a different view. Both readings are shown side by side.
• Editorial note added. The publisher added a note; the law itself may be unchanged.
• Under review. An objection on the merits has been received; we are re-checking the finding and will publish the outcome with reasons.
• Corrected. An official document changed the text. The record links the document, shows the text before and after, and says whether the provision, its publication or the software was changed.
• Corrected before our report. The correction was published before we checked.
• Withdrawn. Our conclusion did not hold. The record keeps its ID and states the reason.

"Corrected" describes a sequence of documents and dates. It does not claim that our report caused the correction.

Counting

One finding is one independently checkable statement about one discrepancy at one place. Classes are counted separately. Questions of reading or data are not counted as discrepancies. Translations, repeated runs and new editions do not create new findings.

Reproduction

Each record links the public evidence repository where one exists: the official files, their hashes and the steps that reproduce the comparison.

Disputes

To dispute a record, write to the address given in the principles with the record ID, the conclusion you dispute and your source. Changes to a record appear in its history and in the feed.

Arxo executes the canon.