Changelog

Release review: verification bound to values, and unknowns made honest

A release review found that verification proved a source had been fetched but not that the number published matched it, and that several results resolved confidently from inputs that had never been supplied. Both classes are corrected.

Verification

• Every published figure, enum, tier and fee component is now declared separately in the verification layer and compared by value. A threshold edited in the data would previously have kept a valid citation; it now fails the build.
• The exact text the quotation checks read is authenticated by its own digest, so editing a quote and its captured snapshot together no longer leaves the record valid.
• Each check is re-run against that authenticated text on every build rather than trusting the recorded result, and each numeric claim must appear in the text its evidence matched.

Results that were resolving on absent information

• A missing date of death counted as zero days elapsed, which silently failed every waiting period and produced a confident “does not qualify” from an empty field. Missing, malformed, impossible and future dates now leave the route undecided.
• Missouri measures the estate after unsecured debt and Washington excludes a surviving spouse’s community-property interest. Neither figure can come from an asset list, and both were effectively treated as zero. Both are now collected, and the result stays undecided until they are supplied.
• North Carolina assesses its value charge on personal property plus the proceeds of real property that is sold, excluding real property that is kept. The charge was being applied to all real property. It now asks whether the property will be sold, and withholds the figure until that is known.
• Missouri’s filing schedule is stated in the statute as applying before adjustment by the supreme court. It is no longer shown as a current total anywhere; it appears as a labelled baseline with a pointer to the operative authority.
• Court charges now show what they are assessed on and what they exclude, next to the figure rather than on a separate page.
• Saved and shared cases restore the jurisdiction-specific figures they store, which previously vanished on reload and quietly returned a resolved answer to undecided.
• Checklist progress saved in a corrupted or outdated form is now reconciled against the checklist that exists, with the reset explained, instead of risking a broken page.

Adversarial review: five understated or misstated figures corrected

An independent adversarial review of the registry against the captured statutory text found figures that were verifiable and still wrong, because the verification confirmed the clause that was cited rather than every clause that applies. Each is recorded individually.

• Washington filing cost was understated by $90. The published figure was the $200 base under RCW 36.18.020(2)(f). Subsection (5)(c) adds a mandatory $40 surcharge to all fees under the section except (2)(b), (d) and (h), and subsection (6) adds $50 to fees under (2)(a), (b), (c), (e), (f) and (g) — which names (f) expressly. The correct statewide total is $290, and it is now itemised.
• Florida omitted a mandatory $4 service charge. Section 28.2401(3) adds it to petitions seeking summary, formal, and ancillary administration. Totals are now $234, $344 and $399 rather than $230, $340 and $395.
• Missouri’s schedule was presented as current. Section 488.012 states those amounts apply “prior to adjustment by the supreme court”, and subsection 2 directs the supreme court to set the operative figures by rule. The schedule is now labelled as a statutory baseline to confirm locally.
• Washington’s threshold counted the wrong property. RCW 11.62.010(2)(c) measures the decedent’s entire estate subject to probate, not personal property alone. The affidavit only transfers personal property, so the counting scope and the transfer scope differ; both are now stated.
• Florida’s summary-administration screen omitted a will condition.Section 735.201(1) also requires that a will not direct administration under chapter 733. That condition is now stated on the page.

Calculation and disclosure fixes

• The navigator showed one generic filing figure that ignored estate value, so Nevada displayed $72 even below the $2,500 threshold where the statute permits no fee. It now prices each schedule and names the proceeding each figure belongs to.
• North Carolina’s $30,000 surviving-spouse ceiling is measured after a statutory allowance this tool does not calculate. That path now returns an indeterminate result instead of a confident answer derived from an undeducted total.
• A malformed fee schedule previously fell back to its highest band, producing a figure no statute supports. It now fails as the data defect it is.
• Restored case data from local storage or a shared link is validated before it reaches any calculation. Negative or non-finite values are discarded with a visible notice rather than silently lowering the estate.
• Verification assertions were re-anchored to the specific clause being cited. Several previously matched the right number in the wrong part of a chapter page, so they could have passed while checking the wrong rule.
• Creditor-notice and claim-bar deadlines are now published as an explicit unknown for every state, naming the chapter to read, rather than being omitted silently.
• The source page previously implied that every build re-fetches each statute. It does not; builds check a recorded result that must be less than 90 days old. The copy now says so.

Source verification harness, and the corrections it produced

Every cited statute is now re-fetched from its publisher and checked against named conditions before release. Building the harness surfaced defects in the initial pilot data that are recorded individually below, because a correction log that only says “improved accuracy” is not a correction log.

Corrections to published figures

• Arizona small-estate value basis. The personal-property affidavit limit was being applied to gross value. A.R.S. § 14-3971(B)(2)(a) measures personal property “less liens and encumbrances”. Estates with financed personal property were therefore screened as ineligible when the statute would have counted them as eligible. Corrected, with a regression test.
• North Carolina intestacy precondition. The affidavit route was presented without stating that N.C. Gen. Stat. § 28A-25-1 applies when the decedent died intestate. A reader with a will could have followed the wrong route. The requirement is now stated on the state page and in the eligibility summary.
• Florida compensation base. The commission base was described as gross probate property. Fla. Stat. § 733.617(1) defines compensable value as inventory value plus income earned during administration. The description now follows the statute.
• All 28 quotations replaced. Every quotation in the initial pilot was a paraphrase presented as quoted statutory text. All of them have been replaced with the publisher’s exact words, and a test now fails the build if any quotation is not found verbatim in the captured source.

New sourced answers

• Statutory filing-cost schedules added for Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, itemised per component and regression-tested against the quoted statute at band boundaries.
• Nevada’s zero-fee band at or below a $2,500 stated estate value, and Virginia’s zero-fee band at or below $5,000, are now published. Both were previously absent, and both matter most to the smallest estates.
• Florida’s formal-administration charge and North Carolina’s per-value assessment with its statutory cap are now computed rather than described.
• Ohio remains without a published filing total. The statute enumerates charges but each county probate court adds its own, so no statewide figure is honest.

Court material

• 13 court-published forms, fee schedules and self-help pages are linked and probed before release. Arizona, Florida, Missouri and Washington publish no statewide small-estate form; each state page now says so instead of leaving the absence unexplained.

Verification gate repaired

The type-check step of the release pipeline was passing without running. The toolchain resolved a Node version below the project’s declared minimum, the language-tooling package failed to load, and the checker fell back to an interactive install prompt that exits successfully when declined. A preflight step now fails closed on both conditions, so a skipped type check is reported as a build failure instead of a pass.

Accessibility and monetisation posture

• A dark-mode contrast failure in the site header is fixed. Text on the brand mark used a fixed white that did not invert with the colour scheme, and a translucent header background left the effective contrast undefined.
• Advertising remains off. The architecture is in place, disabled by default, and the build now fails if any ad marker, publisher id, or non-empty ads.txt appears in the output. No ad network is loaded and no publisher id exists.

Initial reviewed pilot

• 9 jurisdiction records built from primary government sources.
• Private asset classification, small-estate screening, and executor compensation calculations.
• Downloadable source catalog in JSON and CSV, and a seven-phase executor checklist.
• 28 detailed state subroutes kept out of the index for the pilot, so coverage claims stay narrower than the data.