How we source, check, publish and correct

Where the facts come from

Every factual value on this site — a rate, a fee, a processing time, an eligibility rule — is taken from the body that publishes it: a tax administration, a company registry, an immigration service, a ministry. The page it was read from is linked next to it, so the reader can go and disagree with us.

Where a government does not publish something, we say so rather than fill the gap from a secondary source. We do not reproduce proprietary compilations or ranking datasets — we link to their publisher instead.

Source register and licences →

The bar for publishing a change

An entry reaches the change log only with all three of:

1. The authority's own pageA report that a rule changed is not a source. The page the authority publishes is, and it is the one we link.
2. The date we read itEvery entry carries the day we read the fact on that page — not the day it was announced, and never the day the entry was written up.
3. An effective date, or no claim of oneWhere the source states when a change took legal effect, we publish it. Where it does not, the entry says so — rather than wording itself so a date can be inferred.

A change we believe to be real but cannot source does not get published. The same discipline keeps unsourced figures off the country pages: where an authority publishes its fee schedule only through a script we cannot read, the page carries the rule and no number.

How we notice that something changed

We cite 100 official pages. Once a week an automated check re-fetches 89 of them; the other 11 are hosts that refuse every automated client we have, so we do not try — and the source directory says which, rather than leaving a blank that looks like a failure.

On 36 of them it does not compare the page — it compares the values we actually quote. A redesign, a new banner or a reworded paragraph is therefore silent; a rate or an emergency number disappearing from the page is not. The rest are checked for availability only: a source that stops answering is caught, wording changes there are not, and we would rather say that than imply a coverage we do not have.

Three consecutive failures raise an alert on a maintenance queue, and a separate link check — one that counts a firewall block as alive, and a hostname that has stopped existing as broken — covers the pages the weekly fetch cannot reach. That is how broken official links get found and replaced. And what the check produces is a candidate, not an entry: a person opens the official page and decides. Nothing reaches this log automatically.

When we get something wrong

We correct; we do not quietly delete. An entry that turns out to be wrong keeps its place in the log and is marked as corrected, with what was wrong and the date the correction was made.

Entry identifiers are never re-used or re-pointed at different content, so a citation made before a correction keeps resolving to the thing it cited.

Spotted an error? Report it — Corrections & Copyright →

What this is not

Richbay.org is not a government body and is not affiliated with any authority it links to. It aggregates public information and explains it. Nothing here is legal, tax, immigration or financial advice, and no entry replaces the official page it cites.

The site publishes no user-generated content. The only thing we take from readers is what they send us directly about an error or a request.