A report can look complete and still be impossible to verify

A report can be complete in every way its reader can see: every section filled, every finding phrased, every page signed. It can still give that reader no way to check a single conclusion without going back to whoever wrote it.

A report that looks complete and a report that can be verified are two different objects. Completeness is a property of the document. Verifiability is a property of its relationship with the evidence it was decided from.

A document that only asserts does not carry the evidence its assertions were made from, does not say what it could not read, and cannot be checked by the person holding it without going back to its producer. Ask an honest question of an honest report: how do I know this conclusion followed from something that was actually observed? Without those properties, the answer is that you trust the producer. That is a reasonable answer right up until the moment it is the only one available.

This is what we require of every report we produce.

The three things a report has to carry

None of these is a product feature. They are properties an artefact either has or does not.

The evidence each conclusion was decided from. Not summarised, not described: present. A finding that says this site allows anonymous sharing should be reachable to the raw value it read and the moment it was read.

What could not be read. This is the one that matters most, because an absence of findings and a clean result are not the same thing. A report that cannot tell you which questions its evidence could not answer is a report whose silence you cannot interpret.

A way to check it without the producer. If verifying the artefact requires the vendor's platform, the vendor's account or the vendor's word, then the artefact has not been verified. It has been re-asserted.

The third is what lets anybody holding a report check it, and compare two reports, without asking either producer.

We publish one you can check

There is a specimen assessment on this site. It is built from the fixtures our engine ships, so no tenant is behind it and no credential was involved; the tenant in it is invented and says so. What it demonstrates is the shape:

Every finding carries the evidence it was decided from, the kind of claim it is making (whether Microsoft requires it, documents a limit, recommends it, or whether it is a convention or an opinion) and what it does not establish. What could not be read is named rather than counted as fine. And it comes with the instructions to verify all of it, with software that is open source, needs no licence, no account, and no contact with us.

You do not have to believe us about any of that. That is the point of it.

How to read a report, section by section

Revised, 7 November 2026. An earlier version opened with allegations reported about another company. This version sets out only what we require of a report, and the specimen that carries it.

Tags#evidence#governance#privacy